How do corporations get the power that you speak of? Under a free market system (which we do NOT have) a corporation can only get rich and powerful by selling its products, which it can only do if it provides better products and lower prices than their competitors so that their customers will voluntarily pay for them. A corporation cannot take money from you by force, which is the crucial difference between them and the government.
The corruption that you mention is the corruption of the government not the corruption of the corporations. Corporate CEOs are no friends of the free market nor is that their job. They will do whatever benefits their company, including seeking special protectionist laws, laws that increase the burden on their competitors and the price of entry, and finally as we saw recently free money directly from taxpayers pockets. This is the inevitable result of the large and intrusive government which has the power to decide the winners and losers in business as well as a $3.5 trillion annual budget (in case of the federal government alone) to be spent according to the wishes of the bureaucrats. Is it not inevitable then that the corporation see it as more profitable to spend more money on lobbying and bribing politicians for favorable laws and a cut of the taxpayers money than they spend on innovating and improving their products? In short, the answer is not more government but less.
Not sure if you are talking only about the psychopaths (i.e. people who are actually diagnosed as mentally ill) or criminals in general. If you are talking in general, you couldn't be more wrong. First of all, there is much more to justice than rehabilitation of the criminal. Retribution, providing deterrent to future criminals and also the psychological satisfaction to the victim are much more important. I am not even sure that the criminal is entitled to society taking the effort and the expense in order to rehabilitate them, unless they are mentally ill or otherwise incapable of rational judgment (which is why trying young children as adults is reprehensible)
Secondly, what you are arguing for is a justice system based on an arbitrary opinion about the future behavior of people, rather than on their actual actions. When you say "where it is believed they would fall to temptation and repeat their crimes [they should be kept in prison indefinitely]", who is supposed to make the judgment whether they will sometimes in the future fall into temptation and repeat the crimes?
For people who are mentally ill unfortunately the sentence should depend on the opinion of the doctors, so if that's what you were saying then I agree.
Wow, what a genius. So your solution to the problems of a state (run by Democrats since 1970 except for one year), made bankrupt and a laughing stock of the nation by out of control spending, is to increase the spending and lower the taxes at the same time!? And the problem was caused by allowing those pesky people the right to vote on the government initiatives? And the government in California is too small because the Republicans are keeping it that way?
Could you possibly get any more things wrong in one post? Please tell us that the Sun rotates around the Earth and that the Earth is flat and at least we'll know that you are completely insane. Please do yourself and the rest of us a favor and don't ever speak again.
I'm curious why is that trivial statement so often considered to be profound? First of all, it is not particularly special or unique, Greeks have named and discussed the concept of hypocrisy (and wrote plays about it) 400 years before Jesus. Secondly, the statement itself is morally unsound. If only those without a sin are allowed to judge the conduct of others, evil is pretty much guaranteed to flourish. I am not without sin, yet I believe it is my moral duty to call out the immoral conduct of others, there is no hypocrisy or contradiction there.
I consulted with Susan Hough, a seismologist at Caltech. After having a read of the paper, here's what she had to say:
This is a good example of bad science. The earthquake prediction heyday of the 1970s was launched and sustained by similar studies: people who found snippets of data after the fact that showed an apparent correlation between some signal and an eventual earthquake. This is not good statistics. You can't select data after the fact.
In this case, there's no way to know what kind of fluctuations are normally seen in toad activity, or what else might have been going on in the study area that could have influenced toad behavior.
Slashdot interpretation: Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes!!!
They can't testify that you were texting though without pulling records from your cell phone company. I wasn't texting, I was just caressing the keyboard of my phone with my thumb. She likes it when I do that.
Here is an idea. Wouldn't it be nice if the companies looked at Oracle's product and only bought it if it happens to give them a good value for money compared to the competitors products? That way, if the price is too high, nobody will buy it and Oracle will either have to lower the prices or go out of business. Oh wait, that's how it works already.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't know the traffic laws. There IS a fast lane concept in the USA (actually called "passing lane" or "keep right" laws). Of course it is the same speed limit, but the leftmost lane on the freeways is prohibited for vehicles going slower than the normal speed of traffic according to the US Uniform Vehicle Code. Most states have more explicit laws that make it illegal to drive in the left lane when not passing, and some make it illegal not to move to the right when you are in the left lane and a faster car is approaching from behind. Look it up http://www.google.com/search?q="keep+right"+laws
What you don't realize is that is the attitude of drivers EVERYWHERE. I used to live in the UK and the drivers may be slightly more courteous and law abiding in general than in the US but the difference is hardly noticeable. Try driving in southern European countries like Spain and Portugal though and the US drivers will seem like angels.
Couple that with incredibly inadequate driving education and almost no liability. In Michigan we have no-fault. I can "accidentally" sideswipe your car and not get in any trouble, only pay for higher insurance rates
That is an exaggeration. No fault laws AFAIK only exist in a handful of states, and even there they only apply to minor accidents below a certain monetary threshold in order to cut the red tape and free up the courts time from having to deal with every fender-bender. It is hardly true to say that we in the USA have "almost no liability".
Or as one of the creators put it, 'every time Bruce Willis gets shot, you feel it.
So if there is a fight, could you pick which character's you are experiencing, the one throwing the punch or the one on the receiving end? The reason I am asking is that the application of this technology for porn is pretty obvious, but a mistake in picking the character could be pretty devastating.
Because our gov. cares more about the well being of corporations then its citizens.
Why do the citizens elect such a government then? I think the problem is that once we have given our government the power to dispose of $3.5 trillion of our money, supposedly on our behalf, annually the corruption is inevitable because it is down to the arbitrary decisions by the government bureaucrats as to who wins and who loses a share of that loot. If we have not made the government so big and powerful, the corporations would have to make their money more by serving their customers and less by lobbying and bribing politicians.
This sounds more like a publisher's sales pitch than a review, and it is accompanied by an affiliate link. How did editors allow something like this? Please don't buy this book through the link provided. If you must buy it, go to amazon.com and search for it. At least don't encourage spam on slashdot since editors obviously don't care.
Yeah, I remember waaaay back the saying was something like it takes 20% of the time to do the first 80% of the code, and 80% of the time to do the remaining 20%. It would be nice to get every last bug fixed but if you have plans for the rest of your life other than bug fixing you have to draw the line somewhere and get it released.
I don't have a problem with the MS part, I have a problem with the fact that MSNBC has become FOX news of the left. It's even more biased if you ask me. I don't watch either station on TV but I check the web pages occasionally and MSNBC's ceaseless glorification of Obama is creepily reminiscent of personality cults in various totalitarian countries. Currently on the front page the entirely typical "breaking news":
Title: Can Obama sustain success of big week?
Subtitle: The president got victories on health care, college costs and nuclear arsenals. Can he keep this up?
That sure sounds nice but 65 million died of famine under Mao and the Communists are still in power 50 years later and his pictures are still everywhere. Seems like that unraveling is taking a while.
Well I looked it up in a dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism and wikipedia. I understand what you mean, I just think you are misusing the word socialism. What they have in Scandinavia and to some degree in Britain is a capitalist system, except they throw in high taxation which pays for a substantial safety net and other social services (in other words the welfare state).
So you have a problem with totalitarianism but not with socialism? Ok, lets try to understand what is meant by the word socialism:
- redistribution of wealth by the government so as to create a more egalitarian society
- collective (i.e. state) ownership of the means of production and distribution
- central planning of the economic activity
Which of these are compatible with personal freedom of the individual members of the society? Or, do you not consider that important?
Hmm, so what you are saying is that that you were on the "wrong" side once, and now you are on the "right" side and you are angry that you were made to do dirty work for the wrong side. You are not actually giving any reasons for why one site is right and the other is wrong. If you think carefully about what is really in your long term interest, you will come to the conclusion that it is more economic liberty (which historically means more prosperity for everybody) rather than more government control (even if you are a temporary beneficiary of it). You won't have me arguing that the Republican politicians aren't corrupt, of course they are. But, so are the Democrats. You are the one who wants them to have more power over our lives, not me.
1. vitriolic hatred is pretty much all of the tea party consists of
Care to elaborate? Hatred of what exactly?
2. sound fiscal responsibility is finally what this health reform delivers
That is a laughable statement and really not even worth responding to. I guess I could say wait a few years and see, but if you haven't learned from the fact that every attempt so far to solve fiscal problems by more rather than less government involvement has only made the problem worse then you won't learn this time either.
3. health care security is unconstitutional only in creative crackpot legal arguments
I didn't say that the health care bill is unconstitutional, although we'll leave it to the courts to decide that, shall we.
4. and free market principles do not answer every question in life (as the 2008 meltdown demonstrates: you need strong government regulation to keep the markets healthy)
No but historically the free market answers a hell of a lot more questions correctly than central control. 2008 meltdown demonstrates nothing of the sort. We already had strong government regulation when it happened, which I would say was the reason it happened.
a capitalist society with social safety nets is clearly and obviously superior in every measurement to the social darwinism i hear you advocating, even if you don't realize that is what you are advocating. free market fundamentalism died in 2008, i guess you didn't get the memo
I realize exactly what I am advocating but I don't think I can say the same thing about you. A capitalist society with government control of as large portion of the economy as we already have cannot even be truly called a capitalist society. I agree that the safety net should be provided but only for the unfortunate and not for the irresponsible.
I have to say I don't understand the vitriolic hatred you and others on the left have towards the tea party movement. Can you explain it to me? The basic goals of fiscal responsibility (we certainly don't have it in Washington), government acting in accordance with the constitution (if you are against that, please explain why), and free market (the only economic system so far found to produce prosperity) sound ok to me. Of course there will be a few toothless simpletons and conspiracy theorists coming along for the ride in any grassroots movement. Even if you disagree with those goals, I still don't understand the hatred. There are lots of things I disagree with and yet I don't feel the urge to resort to name calling, as much fun as it can be sometimes.
If the individuals in the government want to help somebody voluntarily with their own money than nobody can complain about that. But that's not what you are talking about. You are talking about the government taking money from person A using physical force (try not paying taxes) because it arbitrarily decided that person B needs it more. It doesn't make any difference if that government was democratically elected. Your property is not mine to vote on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoEJ-D2bgc0
If by property rights you mean the rights to own land or other natural resources, then you might have a point that they are based on a utilitarian reasoning. But if you are talking about all property rights then you couldn't be more wrong. Humans cannot survive without property almost anywhere on Earth. Arguing that the right to own property (for example clothes) in say Canada in winter, is an arbitrary right is the same thing as arguing that the right to life is an arbitrary right.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is idiotic to think that it is not the real people (shareholders, employees, customers) who pay corporate taxes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmqoCHR14n8
How do corporations get the power that you speak of? Under a free market system (which we do NOT have) a corporation can only get rich and powerful by selling its products, which it can only do if it provides better products and lower prices than their competitors so that their customers will voluntarily pay for them. A corporation cannot take money from you by force, which is the crucial difference between them and the government.
The corruption that you mention is the corruption of the government not the corruption of the corporations. Corporate CEOs are no friends of the free market nor is that their job. They will do whatever benefits their company, including seeking special protectionist laws, laws that increase the burden on their competitors and the price of entry, and finally as we saw recently free money directly from taxpayers pockets. This is the inevitable result of the large and intrusive government which has the power to decide the winners and losers in business as well as a $3.5 trillion annual budget (in case of the federal government alone) to be spent according to the wishes of the bureaucrats. Is it not inevitable then that the corporation see it as more profitable to spend more money on lobbying and bribing politicians for favorable laws and a cut of the taxpayers money than they spend on innovating and improving their products? In short, the answer is not more government but less.
Not sure if you are talking only about the psychopaths (i.e. people who are actually diagnosed as mentally ill) or criminals in general. If you are talking in general, you couldn't be more wrong. First of all, there is much more to justice than rehabilitation of the criminal. Retribution, providing deterrent to future criminals and also the psychological satisfaction to the victim are much more important. I am not even sure that the criminal is entitled to society taking the effort and the expense in order to rehabilitate them, unless they are mentally ill or otherwise incapable of rational judgment (which is why trying young children as adults is reprehensible)
Secondly, what you are arguing for is a justice system based on an arbitrary opinion about the future behavior of people, rather than on their actual actions. When you say "where it is believed they would fall to temptation and repeat their crimes [they should be kept in prison indefinitely]", who is supposed to make the judgment whether they will sometimes in the future fall into temptation and repeat the crimes?
For people who are mentally ill unfortunately the sentence should depend on the opinion of the doctors, so if that's what you were saying then I agree.
Wow, what a genius. So your solution to the problems of a state (run by Democrats since 1970 except for one year), made bankrupt and a laughing stock of the nation by out of control spending, is to increase the spending and lower the taxes at the same time!? And the problem was caused by allowing those pesky people the right to vote on the government initiatives? And the government in California is too small because the Republicans are keeping it that way?
Could you possibly get any more things wrong in one post? Please tell us that the Sun rotates around the Earth and that the Earth is flat and at least we'll know that you are completely insane. Please do yourself and the rest of us a favor and don't ever speak again.
I'm curious why is that trivial statement so often considered to be profound? First of all, it is not particularly special or unique, Greeks have named and discussed the concept of hypocrisy (and wrote plays about it) 400 years before Jesus. Secondly, the statement itself is morally unsound. If only those without a sin are allowed to judge the conduct of others, evil is pretty much guaranteed to flourish. I am not without sin, yet I believe it is my moral duty to call out the immoral conduct of others, there is no hypocrisy or contradiction there.
From TFA:
I consulted with Susan Hough, a seismologist at Caltech. After having a read of the paper, here's what she had to say: This is a good example of bad science. The earthquake prediction heyday of the 1970s was launched and sustained by similar studies: people who found snippets of data after the fact that showed an apparent correlation between some signal and an eventual earthquake. This is not good statistics. You can't select data after the fact. In this case, there's no way to know what kind of fluctuations are normally seen in toad activity, or what else might have been going on in the study area that could have influenced toad behavior.
Slashdot interpretation: Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes!!!
They can't testify that you were texting though without pulling records from your cell phone company. I wasn't texting, I was just caressing the keyboard of my phone with my thumb. She likes it when I do that.
Here is an idea. Wouldn't it be nice if the companies looked at Oracle's product and only bought it if it happens to give them a good value for money compared to the competitors products? That way, if the price is too high, nobody will buy it and Oracle will either have to lower the prices or go out of business. Oh wait, that's how it works already.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't know the traffic laws. There IS a fast lane concept in the USA (actually called "passing lane" or "keep right" laws). Of course it is the same speed limit, but the leftmost lane on the freeways is prohibited for vehicles going slower than the normal speed of traffic according to the US Uniform Vehicle Code. Most states have more explicit laws that make it illegal to drive in the left lane when not passing, and some make it illegal not to move to the right when you are in the left lane and a faster car is approaching from behind. Look it up http://www.google.com/search?q="keep+right"+laws
What you don't realize is that is the attitude of drivers EVERYWHERE. I used to live in the UK and the drivers may be slightly more courteous and law abiding in general than in the US but the difference is hardly noticeable. Try driving in southern European countries like Spain and Portugal though and the US drivers will seem like angels.
Couple that with incredibly inadequate driving education and almost no liability. In Michigan we have no-fault. I can "accidentally" sideswipe your car and not get in any trouble, only pay for higher insurance rates
That is an exaggeration. No fault laws AFAIK only exist in a handful of states, and even there they only apply to minor accidents below a certain monetary threshold in order to cut the red tape and free up the courts time from having to deal with every fender-bender. It is hardly true to say that we in the USA have "almost no liability".
Or as one of the creators put it, 'every time Bruce Willis gets shot, you feel it.
So if there is a fight, could you pick which character's you are experiencing, the one throwing the punch or the one on the receiving end? The reason I am asking is that the application of this technology for porn is pretty obvious, but a mistake in picking the character could be pretty devastating.
Because our gov. cares more about the well being of corporations then its citizens.
Why do the citizens elect such a government then? I think the problem is that once we have given our government the power to dispose of $3.5 trillion of our money, supposedly on our behalf, annually the corruption is inevitable because it is down to the arbitrary decisions by the government bureaucrats as to who wins and who loses a share of that loot. If we have not made the government so big and powerful, the corporations would have to make their money more by serving their customers and less by lobbying and bribing politicians.
This sounds more like a publisher's sales pitch than a review, and it is accompanied by an affiliate link. How did editors allow something like this? Please don't buy this book through the link provided. If you must buy it, go to amazon.com and search for it. At least don't encourage spam on slashdot since editors obviously don't care.
Yeah, I remember waaaay back the saying was something like it takes 20% of the time to do the first 80% of the code, and 80% of the time to do the remaining 20%. It would be nice to get every last bug fixed but if you have plans for the rest of your life other than bug fixing you have to draw the line somewhere and get it released.
I don't have a problem with the MS part, I have a problem with the fact that MSNBC has become FOX news of the left. It's even more biased if you ask me. I don't watch either station on TV but I check the web pages occasionally and MSNBC's ceaseless glorification of Obama is creepily reminiscent of personality cults in various totalitarian countries. Currently on the front page the entirely typical "breaking news":
Title: Can Obama sustain success of big week?
Subtitle: The president got victories on health care, college costs and nuclear arsenals. Can he keep this up?
That sure sounds nice but 65 million died of famine under Mao and the Communists are still in power 50 years later and his pictures are still everywhere. Seems like that unraveling is taking a while.
Well I looked it up in a dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism and wikipedia. I understand what you mean, I just think you are misusing the word socialism. What they have in Scandinavia and to some degree in Britain is a capitalist system, except they throw in high taxation which pays for a substantial safety net and other social services (in other words the welfare state).
Still better to take it. A million would easily pay for building a moat around his house as well as for some sharks and lasers.
So you have a problem with totalitarianism but not with socialism? Ok, lets try to understand what is meant by the word socialism:
- redistribution of wealth by the government so as to create a more egalitarian society
- collective (i.e. state) ownership of the means of production and distribution
- central planning of the economic activity
Which of these are compatible with personal freedom of the individual members of the society? Or, do you not consider that important?
Hmm, so what you are saying is that that you were on the "wrong" side once, and now you are on the "right" side and you are angry that you were made to do dirty work for the wrong side. You are not actually giving any reasons for why one site is right and the other is wrong. If you think carefully about what is really in your long term interest, you will come to the conclusion that it is more economic liberty (which historically means more prosperity for everybody) rather than more government control (even if you are a temporary beneficiary of it). You won't have me arguing that the Republican politicians aren't corrupt, of course they are. But, so are the Democrats. You are the one who wants them to have more power over our lives, not me.
1. vitriolic hatred is pretty much all of the tea party consists of
Care to elaborate? Hatred of what exactly?
2. sound fiscal responsibility is finally what this health reform delivers
That is a laughable statement and really not even worth responding to. I guess I could say wait a few years and see, but if you haven't learned from the fact that every attempt so far to solve fiscal problems by more rather than less government involvement has only made the problem worse then you won't learn this time either.
3. health care security is unconstitutional only in creative crackpot legal arguments
I didn't say that the health care bill is unconstitutional, although we'll leave it to the courts to decide that, shall we.
4. and free market principles do not answer every question in life (as the 2008 meltdown demonstrates: you need strong government regulation to keep the markets healthy)
No but historically the free market answers a hell of a lot more questions correctly than central control. 2008 meltdown demonstrates nothing of the sort. We already had strong government regulation when it happened, which I would say was the reason it happened.
a capitalist society with social safety nets is clearly and obviously superior in every measurement to the social darwinism i hear you advocating, even if you don't realize that is what you are advocating. free market fundamentalism died in 2008, i guess you didn't get the memo
I realize exactly what I am advocating but I don't think I can say the same thing about you. A capitalist society with government control of as large portion of the economy as we already have cannot even be truly called a capitalist society. I agree that the safety net should be provided but only for the unfortunate and not for the irresponsible.
(i hate teabaggers)
I have to say I don't understand the vitriolic hatred you and others on the left have towards the tea party movement. Can you explain it to me? The basic goals of fiscal responsibility (we certainly don't have it in Washington), government acting in accordance with the constitution (if you are against that, please explain why), and free market (the only economic system so far found to produce prosperity) sound ok to me. Of course there will be a few toothless simpletons and conspiracy theorists coming along for the ride in any grassroots movement. Even if you disagree with those goals, I still don't understand the hatred. There are lots of things I disagree with and yet I don't feel the urge to resort to name calling, as much fun as it can be sometimes.
Congratulations, it's not easy to several different proofs that you are a moron in just two short sentences.
If the individuals in the government want to help somebody voluntarily with their own money than nobody can complain about that. But that's not what you are talking about. You are talking about the government taking money from person A using physical force (try not paying taxes) because it arbitrarily decided that person B needs it more. It doesn't make any difference if that government was democratically elected. Your property is not mine to vote on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoEJ-D2bgc0
If by property rights you mean the rights to own land or other natural resources, then you might have a point that they are based on a utilitarian reasoning. But if you are talking about all property rights then you couldn't be more wrong. Humans cannot survive without property almost anywhere on Earth. Arguing that the right to own property (for example clothes) in say Canada in winter, is an arbitrary right is the same thing as arguing that the right to life is an arbitrary right.