You know, I've often thought that since "corporations are people" seems to be an established principle (under US law) we should start applying the same punishments to corporations we do to people, and I'll bet we'd see a lot less corporate crime. If a corporation commits an act that would net an individual five years in prison, then that corporation has to shut down for five years.
Obvious objections, with answers:
1. "But that would be a death sentence for the company!" Yeah, and a prison sentence, of any length, is a death sentence for a lot of people -- getting stabbed in a fight, getting raped and infected with AIDS, etc. Doesn't stop us from sending people to prison, even those we know are likely to suffer such consequences.
2. "But what about all the workers who depend on the company for their paychecks? We shouldn't make them suffer!" We send people to prison who are the sole source of support for their families, and those families often suffer terribly. "Corporate imprisonment" would be harsh, deliberately so, and in the long run, the improvements in corporate behavior it would force would benefit everyone -- including workers, whose employers would be more likely to behave ethically if there were real consequences for not doing so.
Hachamovitch said he has to balance those concerns with the requests of customers who want new features such as the "tabbed" Web page displays offered by Opera and Firefox.
"You go through and talk to all these people and ask them what they want out of a browser and there are a lot of conflicting requests around: 'Hey, give me tabs right now' versus 'I want stability, I want a platform that won't break, I want to make sure I have extensability, I want to make sure have manageability,' " he said.
I'm not sure why he thinks those requirements conflict with each other. The Moz team doesn't...
"How much should we tax/spend?" and "How should we spend it?" can be debated separately. Even the minimal functions of government you describe require fairly enormous amounts of infrastructure, which these days includes IT; this seems to me a question of "how" rather than "how much", and one on which reasonable people of Left and Right can come to some sort of agreement.
Waste is waste. It doesn't matter if its Open or Closed Source, it will still cost a huge amount and still barely work because it is the government.
[sigh] The computer you used to write that message, and the entire internet infrastructure that allowed it to be posted in a public forum, are largely the results of decades of government and government-funded R&D. The ideological conviction that governments are always inefficient (and the corollary, that private corporations are always efficient) is purely that, an ideology, with no foundation in reality. Governments are good at some things, industry is good at others; there are a very few areas in which both have a significant (postive) role to play, and R&D is one of those few.
But -- one thing that is pretty much guaranteed to be inefficient is close collusion between careerist government bureaucrats and giant, secretive corporations, especially when there exists a revolving door between the government and the industry such that the people in the government making the purchasing decisions (and, increasingly, making the laws) are rewarded with sweetheart deals by the corporations in question, moving back and forth between positions of power in the government and lucrative do-nothing jobs in industry, back and forth, back and forth, with no oversight... which is a pretty accurate description of how things work in the US right now, in government IT and other areas too numerous to mention.
The government has no place doing this sort of promotion. Their job is to use whatever works the best. We have enough problems with ideology in this country - no sense adding more to the fire.
The job of a government is also, hopefully, to spend taxpayers' money wisely. I have no idea what kind of IT infrastructure the Venezuelan government has, but I know for damn sure that the US government wastes tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of tax dollars paying giant companies for closed, proprietary systems that never work as advertised. If Venezuela -- which has a lot less money to play with than Uncle Sam does -- can avoid that trap as a matter of policy, more power to 'em.
[shrug] Lutefisk can be disgusting if it's done badly, but it can also be pretty good. There are a lot of ethnic dishes for which people loudly declare their revulsion -- haggis and menudo come to mind -- ignoring that fact that people wouldn't eat the stuff at all if it were uniformly terrible.
And what's the market share of Windows these days?
Try to compare apples to apples...
Divide the # of viruses by the user base of the affected platform, see who is ahead at that point. I have no idea, my guess is it's probably fairly even, probably just a little slanted in favor of Linux.
Last I heard, there were something like 100 known Linux viruses, and 20 known Mac OS X viruses. Assume the current desktop market share is 3-5% each for Linux and Mac, and Windows still comes out "ahead" by quite a large margin. On the server side, of course, things look even worse for Windows.
In bioinformatics, some open access journals -- PLoS Biology comes to mind -- are getting a lot of citations from authors in the field's traditional printed, subscription-based journals such as Bioinformatics and J. Comp. Bio. And the citation process can be considered a kind of secondary peer review; if you're getting cited, that's a sign that people take you seriously. Science and Nature were new journals once, too... I think what it takes is for major scientists and professional associations to sign on to the open access model. When that happens, the stigma disappears.
Interesting. If I'm reading it right (and IANAL, so it's quite possible I'm not) it looks like you can use a laser pointer in self-defense -- er, to the degree it's useful for that purpose; I think I'd have more faith in a rock or a large stick -- but it's not clear at all that pointing a laser at someone is in the same class as pointing a gun at them, justifiable-homicide-wise. [shrug] I suspect that most juries would take a dim view of someone whose sole defense was, "He was shining a $9.95 laser pointer at me, I had to blow him away!", but of course the circumstances for these things are not always clear-cut.
and yes, if you point a laser at someone, and they shoot you - you cannot hold them legally liable
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but do you have references for court cases that have established that? Sounds a lot like one of those urban legends along the lines of "An undercover cop has to tell you he's a cop if you ask him, 'Are you a cop?'" I've heard that vice cops and FBI organized crime agents get a lot of mileage out of that one...
*shrug* "Social Darwinism" is an unfortunate construct, especially since the people who advocate it have a high crossover with the people who fight against teaching actual evolutionary biology in public schools. But noting that the principles of evolution apply to non-living as well as living systems, and calling those things "___ Darwinism" in general, seems reasonable to me.
That being said, there's one thing I couldn't decipher from the article (yes, I did RTFA): are these preferred quantum states pre-existing, or do they change, sometimes coming into existence by random processes where they didn't exist before? IOW, is there any equivalent to mutation in this "evolutionary" system? If there is, then it's probably reasonable to consider it Darwinian; otherwise, it's not.
... religious Darwinism. IOW, beliefs evolve as previous beliefs are shown to be "unfit," i.e. disproven by observation.
"The Earth is flat, because this passage from the Bible talks about God stopping the Sun directly overhead!"
"Um, no, actually, it's a sphere, and here's the proof."
"Okay, okay! But the celestial bodies are little lights in the sky, and perfect and unblemished, and the go around the Earth!"
"Um, no, actually, they've got all kinds of flaws and blemishes, and they all go around the Sun, and here's the proof."
"Oh, damn! But the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, as we can determine from Biblical genealogies!"
"Um, no, actually, it's been around for a lot longer than that, and here's the proof."
"Aaargh! But humans were specially created by God in His image, and are absolutely unique!"
"Um, no, actually, we look an awful lot like other apes, and that's really not a coincidence, and here's the proof."
"*whimper* All right, so the Earth is round, and it and all the other lumpy rocks revolve around the Sun, and it's all really old, and humans are a lot like apes... but, um, see, there's all this little stuff you scientists haven't quite figured out yet about the specifics, and sometimes you argue about it, and THAT'S ABSOLUTE PROOF OF THAT GOD EXISTS AND HE WANTS YOU TO DO EXACTLY AS _____ (insert your preferred version of a frequently mistranslated, politically loaded anthology of folktales here) SAYS!"
In BigCompanyLand(R)(c)(tm), everyone wants to give BigCompany(R)(c)(tm) all of their money, all the time, and only the dastardly efforts of a small group of malcontent record pirates, communist open source developers, and smelly hippie web site operators are preventing this happy outcome. Thus every shared file, every download of a F/OSS app, and every posting on a free web site represents direct theft from the mouths of the hungry children of BigCompany(R)(c)(tm)'s shareholders, and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, as administered by LawCorp(R)(c)(tm), a wholly owned and operate subsidiary of BigCompany(R)(c)(tm).
Well, yeah, if you're talking about a planet-killer, that's different -- I suspect that in the months before impact, we'd see a period of hyperinflation followed by economic and political breakdown, leading eventually to anarchy. (Me, I'm for hiding away with a few good friends and a bunch of booze.) Whether the rich people could get off the planet -- assuming, of course, that the technological capacity existed; it certainly doesn't now -- would probably depend on how many guns they had stockpiled. But I was thinking more something like a Chicxulub, which would certainly kill a hell of a lot of people, but probably wouldn't mean the end of the human race, and maybe not even civilization, after a fashion.
Well, since those pieces of paper with dead presidents printed on them are no longer backed by anything in particular, the only way they're worth anything now is by consensus. How much good they'd be after the big rock hits would depend on whether or not the survivors decided to agree that they're still worth something. And the habit of agreeing that they're worth something is pretty well ingrained.
Almost certainly, it would depend on whether the governments that printed the little pieces of paper survived the disaster. Which they probably would, for the simple reason that governments are very, very good at ensuring their own survival.
It is correct only if 1) we recognize "game's" as a contraction, or 2) "game's" shows possession.
Addressing (2), it is clear that their is no intent to express possession. Addressing (1), "game's" is no more an acceptable contraction than is "possess'on."
There is no Law of Grammar stating, "Thou shalt know the derivation of contractions and keep it holy: substitute an apostrophe for a vowel in the final three letters of a word."
The only correct rendering of the phrase in question is, "The game is notable... "
You missed case 3: "___'s" as a recognized contraction for "___ is."
"The game is notable..." and "the game's notable" are equivalent. If you're (a contraction for "you are," in case you didn't know) uncomfortable with this, try a few equivalent constructions:
"The cat is on the table" vs. "the cat's on the table."
"He is eating" vs. "he's eating."
"Anonymous Coward is an idiot" vs. "Anonymous Coward's an idiot."
Outside the US, a Yankee is anyone from the US. (Yes, even a Mississippian.)
In the ex-CSA, a Yankee is anyone from north of the Mason-Dixon line and/or west of Texas.
In the rest of the US, a Yankee is anyone from New England.
I've heard that it gets more specific in New England itself -- people from (I think it is) Vermont and New Hampshire are Yankees; in those states it's people from certain parts of the state, etc.
Unfortunately, the only one in print right now is Dawn Crescent.
Um, I mean it's unfortunate that it's the only one, not that it's in print... In any case, I highly recommend it.;)
If you follow the link in my.sig, you'll note that at the bottom of the DC page there are links to other fine Dvorkin novels, written by my father. I recommend those too. And a search for "Dvorkin" on Amazon/BN/etc. will turn up primarily stuff by my family. We're a prolific bunch.
Thanks for your interest! I'd be happy to hear what you think.
On a more serious note, do you ever stop and think that 500 years from now our ancestors are going to be making fun of us and our backwards notions of the world?
Seriously, no, I don't -- because, just about 500 years ago, something fundamental changed in our worldview: science, in the modern sense, was born. The scientists of the Renaissance (Galileo, Kepler, Newton come to mind) were wrong about many things, but they were right about many more, and they established the methods we still use today to understand our world. And we don't make fun of them; instead, we make fun of the backwards ideas which their new understanding displaced.
Now, I'll grant for the sake of argument that it's possible that the scientific worldview is, itself, just as much fundamentally in error as the theological worldview of the Middle Ages, and that something will happen between now and 2504 A.D. that will make our current understanding of The Way Things Are see as silly as epicycles and the music of the spheres do today. But I really wouldn't bet on it.
Or more specifically, white males of Irish background -- who were, in fact, until within living memory, stereotyped as drunk, violent, stupid, and Not Like Us. Looks like they shook that stereotype just in time. There was a religious aspect, as well, of course; Catholicism was regarded with suspicion by "real", i.e. Protestant, Americans throughout much of the 19th c. and well into the 20th. There were anti-Catholic/anti-Irish riots, exclusionary laws, the whole nine yards. Now that Irishness and Catholicism are no longer considered foreign... hey! Look at that Arab terrorist / job-stealing Indian / ____ ____ over there! The names change; the attitudes don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia is town-meeting democracy, not communism.
How do you feel about democracy?
You know, I've often thought that since "corporations are people" seems to be an established principle (under US law) we should start applying the same punishments to corporations we do to people, and I'll bet we'd see a lot less corporate crime. If a corporation commits an act that would net an individual five years in prison, then that corporation has to shut down for five years.
Obvious objections, with answers:
1. "But that would be a death sentence for the company!" Yeah, and a prison sentence, of any length, is a death sentence for a lot of people -- getting stabbed in a fight, getting raped and infected with AIDS, etc. Doesn't stop us from sending people to prison, even those we know are likely to suffer such consequences.
2. "But what about all the workers who depend on the company for their paychecks? We shouldn't make them suffer!" We send people to prison who are the sole source of support for their families, and those families often suffer terribly. "Corporate imprisonment" would be harsh, deliberately so, and in the long run, the improvements in corporate behavior it would force would benefit everyone -- including workers, whose employers would be more likely to behave ethically if there were real consequences for not doing so.
From the article:
...
Hachamovitch said he has to balance those concerns with the requests of customers who want new features such as the "tabbed" Web page displays offered by Opera and Firefox.
"You go through and talk to all these people and ask them what they want out of a browser and there are a lot of conflicting requests around: 'Hey, give me tabs right now' versus 'I want stability, I want a platform that won't break, I want to make sure I have extensability, I want to make sure have manageability,' " he said.
I'm not sure why he thinks those requirements conflict with each other. The Moz team doesn't
"How much should we tax/spend?" and "How should we spend it?" can be debated separately. Even the minimal functions of government you describe require fairly enormous amounts of infrastructure, which these days includes IT; this seems to me a question of "how" rather than "how much", and one on which reasonable people of Left and Right can come to some sort of agreement.
Waste is waste. It doesn't matter if its Open or Closed Source, it will still cost a huge amount and still barely work because it is the government.
... which is a pretty accurate description of how things work in the US right now, in government IT and other areas too numerous to mention.
[sigh] The computer you used to write that message, and the entire internet infrastructure that allowed it to be posted in a public forum, are largely the results of decades of government and government-funded R&D. The ideological conviction that governments are always inefficient (and the corollary, that private corporations are always efficient) is purely that, an ideology, with no foundation in reality. Governments are good at some things, industry is good at others; there are a very few areas in which both have a significant (postive) role to play, and R&D is one of those few.
But -- one thing that is pretty much guaranteed to be inefficient is close collusion between careerist government bureaucrats and giant, secretive corporations, especially when there exists a revolving door between the government and the industry such that the people in the government making the purchasing decisions (and, increasingly, making the laws) are rewarded with sweetheart deals by the corporations in question, moving back and forth between positions of power in the government and lucrative do-nothing jobs in industry, back and forth, back and forth, with no oversight
The government has no place doing this sort of promotion. Their job is to use whatever works the best. We have enough problems with ideology in this country - no sense adding more to the fire.
The job of a government is also, hopefully, to spend taxpayers' money wisely. I have no idea what kind of IT infrastructure the Venezuelan government has, but I know for damn sure that the US government wastes tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of tax dollars paying giant companies for closed, proprietary systems that never work as advertised. If Venezuela -- which has a lot less money to play with than Uncle Sam does -- can avoid that trap as a matter of policy, more power to 'em.
[shrug] Lutefisk can be disgusting if it's done badly, but it can also be pretty good. There are a lot of ethnic dishes for which people loudly declare their revulsion -- haggis and menudo come to mind -- ignoring that fact that people wouldn't eat the stuff at all if it were uniformly terrible.
And what's the market share of Windows these days?
Try to compare apples to apples...
Divide the # of viruses by the user base of the affected platform, see who is ahead at that point. I have no idea, my guess is it's probably fairly even, probably just a little slanted in favor of Linux.
Last I heard, there were something like 100 known Linux viruses, and 20 known Mac OS X viruses. Assume the current desktop market share is 3-5% each for Linux and Mac, and Windows still comes out "ahead" by quite a large margin. On the server side, of course, things look even worse for Windows.
In bioinformatics, some open access journals -- PLoS Biology comes to mind -- are getting a lot of citations from authors in the field's traditional printed, subscription-based journals such as Bioinformatics and J. Comp. Bio. And the citation process can be considered a kind of secondary peer review; if you're getting cited, that's a sign that people take you seriously. Science and Nature were new journals once, too ... I think what it takes is for major scientists and professional associations to sign on to the open access model. When that happens, the stigma disappears.
Interesting. If I'm reading it right (and IANAL, so it's quite possible I'm not) it looks like you can use a laser pointer in self-defense -- er, to the degree it's useful for that purpose; I think I'd have more faith in a rock or a large stick -- but it's not clear at all that pointing a laser at someone is in the same class as pointing a gun at them, justifiable-homicide-wise. [shrug] I suspect that most juries would take a dim view of someone whose sole defense was, "He was shining a $9.95 laser pointer at me, I had to blow him away!", but of course the circumstances for these things are not always clear-cut.
and yes, if you point a laser at someone, and they shoot you - you cannot hold them legally liable
...
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but do you have references for court cases that have established that? Sounds a lot like one of those urban legends along the lines of "An undercover cop has to tell you he's a cop if you ask him, 'Are you a cop?'" I've heard that vice cops and FBI organized crime agents get a lot of mileage out of that one
*shrug* "Social Darwinism" is an unfortunate construct, especially since the people who advocate it have a high crossover with the people who fight against teaching actual evolutionary biology in public schools. But noting that the principles of evolution apply to non-living as well as living systems, and calling those things "___ Darwinism" in general, seems reasonable to me.
That being said, there's one thing I couldn't decipher from the article (yes, I did RTFA): are these preferred quantum states pre-existing, or do they change, sometimes coming into existence by random processes where they didn't exist before? IOW, is there any equivalent to mutation in this "evolutionary" system? If there is, then it's probably reasonable to consider it Darwinian; otherwise, it's not.
... religious Darwinism. IOW, beliefs evolve as previous beliefs are shown to be "unfit," i.e. disproven by observation.
... but, um, see, there's all this little stuff you scientists haven't quite figured out yet about the specifics, and sometimes you argue about it, and THAT'S ABSOLUTE PROOF OF THAT GOD EXISTS AND HE WANTS YOU TO DO EXACTLY AS _____ (insert your preferred version of a frequently mistranslated, politically loaded anthology of folktales here) SAYS!"
"The Earth is flat, because this passage from the Bible talks about God stopping the Sun directly overhead!"
"Um, no, actually, it's a sphere, and here's the proof."
"Okay, okay! But the celestial bodies are little lights in the sky, and perfect and unblemished, and the go around the Earth!"
"Um, no, actually, they've got all kinds of flaws and blemishes, and they all go around the Sun, and here's the proof."
"Oh, damn! But the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, as we can determine from Biblical genealogies!"
"Um, no, actually, it's been around for a lot longer than that, and here's the proof."
"Aaargh! But humans were specially created by God in His image, and are absolutely unique!"
"Um, no, actually, we look an awful lot like other apes, and that's really not a coincidence, and here's the proof."
"*whimper* All right, so the Earth is round, and it and all the other lumpy rocks revolve around the Sun, and it's all really old, and humans are a lot like apes
In BigCompanyLand(R)(c)(tm), everyone wants to give BigCompany(R)(c)(tm) all of their money, all the time, and only the dastardly efforts of a small group of malcontent record pirates, communist open source developers, and smelly hippie web site operators are preventing this happy outcome. Thus every shared file, every download of a F/OSS app, and every posting on a free web site represents direct theft from the mouths of the hungry children of BigCompany(R)(c)(tm)'s shareholders, and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, as administered by LawCorp(R)(c)(tm), a wholly owned and operate subsidiary of BigCompany(R)(c)(tm).
Hope this clears things up.
Well, yeah, if you're talking about a planet-killer, that's different -- I suspect that in the months before impact, we'd see a period of hyperinflation followed by economic and political breakdown, leading eventually to anarchy. (Me, I'm for hiding away with a few good friends and a bunch of booze.) Whether the rich people could get off the planet -- assuming, of course, that the technological capacity existed; it certainly doesn't now -- would probably depend on how many guns they had stockpiled. But I was thinking more something like a Chicxulub, which would certainly kill a hell of a lot of people, but probably wouldn't mean the end of the human race, and maybe not even civilization, after a fashion.
Well, since those pieces of paper with dead presidents printed on them are no longer backed by anything in particular, the only way they're worth anything now is by consensus. How much good they'd be after the big rock hits would depend on whether or not the survivors decided to agree that they're still worth something. And the habit of agreeing that they're worth something is pretty well ingrained.
Almost certainly, it would depend on whether the governments that printed the little pieces of paper survived the disaster. Which they probably would, for the simple reason that governments are very, very good at ensuring their own survival.
Umm... No, it is not grammatically correct.
..." and "the game's notable" are equivalent. If you're (a contraction for "you are," in case you didn't know) uncomfortable with this, try a few equivalent constructions:
It is correct only if 1) we recognize "game's" as a contraction, or 2) "game's" shows possession.
Addressing (2), it is clear that their is no intent to express possession. Addressing (1), "game's" is no more an acceptable contraction than is "possess'on."
There is no Law of Grammar stating, "Thou shalt know the derivation of contractions and keep it holy: substitute an apostrophe for a vowel in the final three letters of a word."
The only correct rendering of the phrase in question is, "The game is notable... "
You missed case 3: "___'s" as a recognized contraction for "___ is."
"The game is notable
"The cat is on the table" vs. "the cat's on the table."
"He is eating" vs. "he's eating."
"Anonymous Coward is an idiot" vs. "Anonymous Coward's an idiot."
See now?
Your second sentence contradicts your first.
And Junkscience.com is about as reliable a source as, say, the Institute for Creation Research.
junk science (n.): Any science which comes to conclusions which have political implications with which the person using the phrase disagrees.
Well, at this point we're leaning too far to the right. Maybe if we all just straighten up?
Outside the US, a Yankee is anyone from the US. (Yes, even a Mississippian.)
In the ex-CSA, a Yankee is anyone from north of the Mason-Dixon line and/or west of Texas.
In the rest of the US, a Yankee is anyone from New England.
I've heard that it gets more specific in New England itself -- people from (I think it is) Vermont and New Hampshire are Yankees; in those states it's people from certain parts of the state, etc.
Odd word.
Unfortunately, the only one in print right now is Dawn Crescent.
... In any case, I highly recommend it. ;)
.sig, you'll note that at the bottom of the DC page there are links to other fine Dvorkin novels, written by my father. I recommend those too. And a search for "Dvorkin" on Amazon/BN/etc. will turn up primarily stuff by my family. We're a prolific bunch.
Um, I mean it's unfortunate that it's the only one, not that it's in print
If you follow the link in my
Thanks for your interest! I'd be happy to hear what you think.
Well, thank you! Whatever you think of my vision, hopefully you won't find it as laughable as phrenology or Uranium For Your Health(tm). ;)
On a more serious note, do you ever stop and think that 500 years from now our ancestors are going to be making fun of us and our backwards notions of the world?
Seriously, no, I don't -- because, just about 500 years ago, something fundamental changed in our worldview: science, in the modern sense, was born. The scientists of the Renaissance (Galileo, Kepler, Newton come to mind) were wrong about many things, but they were right about many more, and they established the methods we still use today to understand our world. And we don't make fun of them; instead, we make fun of the backwards ideas which their new understanding displaced.
Now, I'll grant for the sake of argument that it's possible that the scientific worldview is, itself, just as much fundamentally in error as the theological worldview of the Middle Ages, and that something will happen between now and 2504 A.D. that will make our current understanding of The Way Things Are see as silly as epicycles and the music of the spheres do today. But I really wouldn't bet on it.
Or more specifically, white males of Irish background -- who were, in fact, until within living memory, stereotyped as drunk, violent, stupid, and Not Like Us. Looks like they shook that stereotype just in time. There was a religious aspect, as well, of course; Catholicism was regarded with suspicion by "real", i.e. Protestant, Americans throughout much of the 19th c. and well into the 20th. There were anti-Catholic/anti-Irish riots, exclusionary laws, the whole nine yards. Now that Irishness and Catholicism are no longer considered foreign ... hey! Look at that Arab terrorist / job-stealing Indian / ____ ____ over there! The names change; the attitudes don't.