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A comment on Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol. Parent comment

Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by sosborn on Thursday February 19, 2015 @11:12AM (#9074775)
How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?
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Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by O____________O on Thursday February 19, 2015 @01:18PM (#9075756)
He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.
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Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by pdonis on Thursday February 19, 2015 @01:32PM (#9075854)
And how do you decide what N is?
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Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by O____________O on Thursday February 19, 2015 @03:59PM (#9077001)
Not my problem. I'm only pointing out that the parent comment asked a question that implied a misunderstanding of GP.
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Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by pdonis on Thursday February 19, 2015 @05:45PM (#9077667)
I don't think the parent to your comment misunderstood the GP. I think he was making a valid point: that in order to pick the "right" value of N, you have to know what value of N will maximize the greater good. Unless you can do that, the proposed law does not make sense; and saying "I'm not trying to specify what the greater good is, I'm just picking a number N" does not change that.
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Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by O____________O on Friday February 20, 2015 @03:05PM (#9082614)
in order to pick the "right" value of N, you have to know what value of N will maximize the greater good.

What? No. The comment said nothing whatsoever about 'N'. GP's comment was exactly this, and nothing more:

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?

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Re:Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol by pdonis on Friday February 20, 2015 @09:50PM (#9084468)
> The comment said nothing whatsoever about 'N'.

Not explicitly, no. I drew an inference about what the GP commenter meant (or at least an obvious implication of what I think he meant). He's welcome to correct me if my inference was wrong.

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