> There is a myth that companies have "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders.
No, only the company officers have fiduciary responsibilities to the shareholders, and they are not required to be omniscient, just to make rational (well, rationalize-able) decisions about company business. Buying corporate jets or rebuilding the HQ in gold-plate and rosewood can be, and have all been, justified (if only as reasonable mistakes). Therefore, anyone complaining about Google leaving a few percent of its profits on the table is going to have a hard job; if Google were doing only as well as an ordinary company they could still waste that much (at least that much as a ratio of value or operating expenses to profits) safely.
Bell Labs made pre-split AT&T lots of money, by raising the reported costs and thus allowing more money to be returned to shareholders as increased dividends rather than to customers as decreased rates (if the legal limit of profits was 5% of operating expenses, one million dollars to Bell Labs sheltered 20 million dollars of otherwise "excess" profits). They also made money by improving customer service and/or availability rates, since service failures were punished by major fines to whichever operating company screwed up. They also made money, since Western Union, the equipment division, was owned by Bell Labs (rather than Lucent, the old Western Union, owning Bell Labs/Telcordia, as was the case after the split-up) and sold equipment around the world.
Post-split, the operating companies were assigned to the various pieces, and the return limits were eliminated on any new businesses (like cable or cellular service, or ILEC-controlled long distance) that the pieces invested in, which meant that old telephone service stayed at the same quality that it had before breakup, but that any profits produced by that service went into new (return unlimited) technologies or acquiring other pieces of the old AT investment in research that would benefit all the telco industry was no longer sheltering "excess" profits but was a pure cost, and a pure cost to just the one company, Lucent, at that. Any wonder that the Bell Labs of Lucent did not live up to the reputation of the old Bell Labs?
So long as Google can convince a judge that its research investments just might (not will) result in profits, reduced costs, or just keeping up with competition, then shareholder lawsuits will fail; since Henry Ford lost the original suit when he wanted to increase employee pay because he didn't want the profits to go to the shareholders (because, at the time, he still thought of himself as a working man, not a capitalist), companies have become quite ingenious at casting their decisions as improving profits even when it is just re-paneling the Executive Conference Room in rosewood rather than knotty pine.
Why is no one raising the issue that demanding users hand over passwords violate Facebook's Terms of Service [facebook.com]?:
Because they are not asking that? They ask that you log into your page, not that they do it. I assume that the idea is to see if you put the wrong sort of info out there which is one Facebook privacy change away from being visible to your or their worst enemy.
Be glad that you aren't naming them after US football stadia. They change their names every few years, or when the company that bought the naming rights goes bankrupt.
Bottom line - if you can't say your server name 3 times fast, then you are hindering the humans that have to talk about that server on a daily basis.
So naming servers after the evil gods in the Lovecraft/Cthulhu mythos is no good? Bummer, there goes yogsuthoth and nyarlathotep. At least I get to keep Hastur and Miskatonic U.
The Nazis could have kept Teller and a huge bunch of other excellent Jewish scientists, if only their grotesque racism didn't blind them, and push the Jewish scientists to the West (the USA mostly).
But then they would not have been Nazis, just ordinary nationalists, and no one would have cared about them.
Anyway, it is obvious why the Nazis were so anti-Jewish. The Jews had the highest per capita rate of officers in the Imperial Army during the Kaiserian war, and thus proved their superiority by the Germans' own criteria, so the southern Germans and Austrians (the least respected portion) had to kill off the Jews before they were out-competed. Simple Darwinism.
There's a big difference between being fucked to death by a horny sex goddess out of Victoria's Secret catalogue and drowning in a septic tank. Of course, for loserboy nerds like you the second option is the only one possible.
prove it...
Careful. He's likely to start by arranging the second method, first.
If you are going to suck up to Oppy, get his argument right. His main point was that H-bombs could not remain a secret, once demonstrated, and that the West had far more vulnerability to them than did the much less concentrated USSR of the time. The idea that killing millions of Soviets via nuclear weapons was morally inferior to tens of millions dead from another conventional war after the USSR expended their arsenal on Europe would have been ridiculous even to Oppenheimer's many CP-USA friends and relatives, let alone him.
Actually, it was the mid-range officers that tried the coup, and the fact that they could get none of the generals to join in, after the second A-bomb, that defeated it.
BTW, the second A-bomb was necessary to prove that the first was not a one-time thing, like the recent earthquake and tsunami was. Once could have been a coincidence, or the only one that we had. Two ends the denial phase.
Those civilians were innocent. Caught up in a war they didn't want. Their slaughter cannot be justified.
Tell it to the Japanese about China, especially the Nanking Massacre. Those Japanese civilians were caught up in a war that they LOVED, right up until they started getting bombed on a regular basis.
So God is universal, omnipresent, and doesn't interact directly with people at all.
Sounds like the Unitarian-Universalists were right !
Only some of them. Others are not sure of versions of godhood that are entirely different.
Actually, I would call it The Force and say that George Lucas was right (since we can influence dark matter, by our own mass - maybe someone with midichlorians could have more influence?).
Is the Finnish pilkunnussija different from the netnews-era English-writing term grammar nazi?
Anyway, the correct response to shotgun's original question is that the two formulations are equivalent in this case, much like the response to asking if a square shouldn't be called an equi-angle rhombus rather than a rectangle with equal length sides. If the collision had been merely inferred (like that between Thetis and the pre-moon Earth) rather than observed using light (which moves at the presumed-fixed speed of light) then that would be different.
Oddly, I am now reading some of Larry Niven's Known Space series, in which some societies are dealing with the Galactic Core Explosion which will sterilize the galaxy some 30,000 years hence, and which was only discovered by use of a much-faster-than-their-usual-faster-than-light-drives drive on a trip to the Core for publicity and in hopes of investment capital. In this case, shotgun would be completely wrong.
Say what you will, I miss Omni, goofy pseudo-science and all. It was usually entertaining, as long as you didn't take it too seriously...
I just read it for the fiction.
OTOH, I *do* remember reading about GRID (later renamed AIDS) in OMNI well before I did anywhere else. Actually, I think that I read about it before it was named, even.
Marriages are handled at the state, territory, or Indian Tribal level of government, not by the US Government. Even in the District of Columbia, it is a local matter (ignoring that the US government is the 900 lb gorilla in DC laws).
No, technically in only a few places, anymore, is it possible to enter in to a common-law marriage. Living together and claiming to be married, with the intention of being married, is all that is required in most jurisdictions - no particular period necessary. OTOH, if the couple resides in a state that allows new common-law marriages, then the marriage must be recognized by any other state unless specifically unrecognized by that state (e.g., Louisiana doesn't recognize existing first cousin marriages regardless of the laws in the state where they were originally married).
Also, except in the case of the wife dying, it is usually only recognized if the wife wants it. Basically like custody. It would also be interesting to check if any state recognizing common-law marriage recognizes gay marriage (which was what the GP was writing about) - I rather doubt it.
Arguments that a gay marriage entered into without the intention of having or adopting children is not really a marriage except in the de jure sense is left as an exercise for Anthropology 201.
Pre-nups are stupid; it's like saying "I love you dear, but I expect we'll get divorced someday".
Pre-nups are not at all stupid. They ARE cold as hell, which is why they only tend to appear in second or third marriages, or when one's lawyers are day-to-day associates.
If you get screwed in love and you lose out, the lessons are that love can sometimes hurt and that women are expensive. Duh!
And that you should have had a pre-nup, assuming any assets before the marriage. Most people get married when too young and un-wealthy for a prenup to help, of course (unless the pre-nup becomes an occasionally updated in-case-of-splitup contract).
except you could also produce 10x as much. With the growing experience of living 10x as long you'd probably contribute much more than 10x as much.
Except that most people would live to gather the wisdom of 1 year, 1000 times, instead the experience of 1000 years. Seriously, after a couple years as a hotel room clerk, gas station attendant, bank teller, assembly line worker, stripper, waiter or waitress, etc., how much more do you learn? Or, if this had appeared 1000 years ago, how much would you get from the doctor who spent 850 years convinced that bleeding someone treated anything (except porpheria), the farmer who could run a team of oxen but thought that horse collars were new-fangled (ignoring tractors, or no-till techniques), or the sailor who spent most of his life on single-masted square-sailed ships with oars but now worked on roll-on-roll-off transports?
And these moslems in Andalucia got into their controlling position by free elections, I suppose? In fact, I would question whether they were ever in the majority, let alone when they conquered it.
Furthermore, aristotle-dude neglected the invasions of Egypt, which was overwhelmingly Christian (as well as a part of the Roman Empire [the part usually called Byzantine by the modern West]), and the rest of North Africa, as well as Syria, Palestine, whatever they called modern-day Jordan at the time, etc., as well as subsequent invasions of the Imperial heartlands in what is now called Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, etc.
Complaining that the Christians were not as cultured as the Moslems, and therefore had no right to defense or counter-attack, is not only absurd (since the Roman Empire in Constantinople certainly put the best of Islam to shame, in that respect), but implies that the Nazis had the right to invade anyplace because there were more and better orchestras in Germany than insert-your-victim-here.
Atheism is a necessary part of (Leninist-style, at least) communism, according to most of its official ideologues. Further, they killed some religious believers who were otherwise not objecting to other communist doctrines such as state ownership of all means of production. Therefore, the communists killed for atheism.
At least some of them. OTOH, communists also executed people for choosing their ancestors poorly (the Czars minor children, frex). Sometimes, the communists executed people for backing the wrong communists in the competition for power among themselves. Basically, communists were not good people, at least in large numbers or state apparatuses, although I expect that a few were, as individuals.
Stalin did NOT collect stamps. This lack of stamp collecting was of course the main reason his leadership led to some much death and suffering. We must immediately promote stamp collecting to stop this sort of grievous crime from every happening again.
Did he ever speak or write, objecting to the hoarding of stamps as a sign of counter-revolutionary activity? If not, I would question your second premise.
Slashdot Mirror
> There is a myth that companies have "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders.
No, only the company officers have fiduciary responsibilities to the shareholders, and they are not required to be omniscient, just to make rational (well, rationalize-able) decisions about company business. Buying corporate jets or rebuilding the HQ in gold-plate and rosewood can be, and have all been, justified (if only as reasonable mistakes). Therefore, anyone complaining about Google leaving a few percent of its profits on the table is going to have a hard job; if Google were doing only as well as an ordinary company they could still waste that much (at least that much as a ratio of value or operating expenses to profits) safely.
Bell Labs made pre-split AT&T lots of money, by raising the reported costs and thus allowing more money to be returned to shareholders as increased dividends rather than to customers as decreased rates (if the legal limit of profits was 5% of operating expenses, one million dollars to Bell Labs sheltered 20 million dollars of otherwise "excess" profits). They also made money by improving customer service and/or availability rates, since service failures were punished by major fines to whichever operating company screwed up. They also made money, since Western Union, the equipment division, was owned by Bell Labs (rather than Lucent, the old Western Union, owning Bell Labs/Telcordia, as was the case after the split-up) and sold equipment around the world.
Post-split, the operating companies were assigned to the various pieces, and the return limits were eliminated on any new businesses (like cable or cellular service, or ILEC-controlled long distance) that the pieces invested in, which meant that old telephone service stayed at the same quality that it had before breakup, but that any profits produced by that service went into new (return unlimited) technologies or acquiring other pieces of the old AT investment in research that would benefit all the telco industry was no longer sheltering "excess" profits but was a pure cost, and a pure cost to just the one company, Lucent, at that. Any wonder that the Bell Labs of Lucent did not live up to the reputation of the old Bell Labs?
So long as Google can convince a judge that its research investments just might (not will) result in profits, reduced costs, or just keeping up with competition, then shareholder lawsuits will fail; since Henry Ford lost the original suit when he wanted to increase employee pay because he didn't want the profits to go to the shareholders (because, at the time, he still thought of himself as a working man, not a capitalist), companies have become quite ingenious at casting their decisions as improving profits even when it is just re-paneling the Executive Conference Room in rosewood rather than knotty pine.
Why is no one raising the issue that demanding users hand over passwords violate Facebook's Terms of Service [facebook.com]?:
Because they are not asking that? They ask that you log into your page, not that they do it. I assume that the idea is to see if you put the wrong sort of info out there which is one Facebook privacy change away from being visible to your or their worst enemy.
Seriously, get your worries right.
But does he have a *voice* ?
Be glad that you aren't naming them after US football stadia. They change their names every few years, or when the company that bought the naming rights goes bankrupt.
Bottom line - if you can't say your server name 3 times fast, then you are hindering the humans that have to talk about that server on a daily basis.
So naming servers after the evil gods in the Lovecraft/Cthulhu mythos is no good? Bummer, there goes yogsuthoth and nyarlathotep. At least I get to keep Hastur and Miskatonic U.
The Nazis could have kept Teller and a huge bunch of other excellent Jewish scientists, if only their grotesque racism didn't blind them, and push the Jewish scientists to the West (the USA mostly).
But then they would not have been Nazis, just ordinary nationalists, and no one would have cared about them.
Anyway, it is obvious why the Nazis were so anti-Jewish. The Jews had the highest per capita rate of officers in the Imperial Army during the Kaiserian war, and thus proved their superiority by the Germans' own criteria, so the southern Germans and Austrians (the least respected portion) had to kill off the Jews before they were out-competed. Simple Darwinism.
There's a big difference between being fucked to death by a horny sex goddess out of Victoria's Secret catalogue and drowning in a septic tank. Of course, for loserboy nerds like you the second option is the only one possible.
prove it ...
Careful. He's likely to start by arranging the second method, first.
If you are going to suck up to Oppy, get his argument right. His main point was that H-bombs could not remain a secret, once demonstrated, and that the West had far more vulnerability to them than did the much less concentrated USSR of the time. The idea that killing millions of Soviets via nuclear weapons was morally inferior to tens of millions dead from another conventional war after the USSR expended their arsenal on Europe would have been ridiculous even to Oppenheimer's many CP-USA friends and relatives, let alone him.
Actually, it was the mid-range officers that tried the coup, and the fact that they could get none of the generals to join in, after the second A-bomb, that defeated it.
BTW, the second A-bomb was necessary to prove that the first was not a one-time thing, like the recent earthquake and tsunami was. Once could have been a coincidence, or the only one that we had. Two ends the denial phase.
Those civilians were innocent. Caught up in a war they didn't want. Their slaughter cannot be justified.
Tell it to the Japanese about China, especially the Nanking Massacre. Those Japanese civilians were caught up in a war that they LOVED, right up until they started getting bombed on a regular basis.
So God is universal, omnipresent, and doesn't interact directly with people at all.
Sounds like the Unitarian-Universalists were right !
Only some of them. Others are not sure of versions of godhood that are entirely different.
Actually, I would call it The Force and say that George Lucas was right (since we can influence dark matter, by our own mass - maybe someone with midichlorians could have more influence?).
Is the Finnish pilkunnussija different from the netnews-era English-writing term grammar nazi?
Anyway, the correct response to shotgun's original question is that the two formulations are equivalent in this case, much like the response to asking if a square shouldn't be called an equi-angle rhombus rather than a rectangle with equal length sides. If the collision had been merely inferred (like that between Thetis and the pre-moon Earth) rather than observed using light (which moves at the presumed-fixed speed of light) then that would be different.
Oddly, I am now reading some of Larry Niven's Known Space series, in which some societies are dealing with the Galactic Core Explosion which will sterilize the galaxy some 30,000 years hence, and which was only discovered by use of a much-faster-than-their-usual-faster-than-light-drives drive on a trip to the Core for publicity and in hopes of investment capital. In this case, shotgun would be completely wrong.
Excellent idea, sir. Funny, Interesting, or Informative, though?
Say what you will, I miss Omni, goofy pseudo-science and all. It was usually entertaining, as long as you didn't take it too seriously...
I just read it for the fiction.
OTOH, I *do* remember reading about GRID (later renamed AIDS) in OMNI well before I did anywhere else. Actually, I think that I read about it before it was named, even.
Marriages are handled at the state, territory, or Indian Tribal level of government, not by the US Government. Even in the District of Columbia, it is a local matter (ignoring that the US government is the 900 lb gorilla in DC laws).
No, technically in only a few places, anymore, is it possible to enter in to a common-law marriage. Living together and claiming to be married, with the intention of being married, is all that is required in most jurisdictions - no particular period necessary. OTOH, if the couple resides in a state that allows new common-law marriages, then the marriage must be recognized by any other state unless specifically unrecognized by that state (e.g., Louisiana doesn't recognize existing first cousin marriages regardless of the laws in the state where they were originally married).
Also, except in the case of the wife dying, it is usually only recognized if the wife wants it. Basically like custody. It would also be interesting to check if any state recognizing common-law marriage recognizes gay marriage (which was what the GP was writing about) - I rather doubt it.
Arguments that a gay marriage entered into without the intention of having or adopting children is not really a marriage except in the de jure sense is left as an exercise for Anthropology 201.
And don't forget the reason that divorce costs so much....because it's totally worth it.
That depends on how cheaply you can hire a killing (at least in several friends' cases).
Pre-nups are stupid; it's like saying "I love you dear, but I expect we'll get divorced someday".
Pre-nups are not at all stupid. They ARE cold as hell, which is why they only tend to appear in second or third marriages, or when one's lawyers are day-to-day associates.
If you get screwed in love and you lose out, the lessons are that love can sometimes hurt and that women are expensive. Duh!
And that you should have had a pre-nup, assuming any assets before the marriage. Most people get married when too young and un-wealthy for a prenup to help, of course (unless the pre-nup becomes an occasionally updated in-case-of-splitup contract).
except you could also produce 10x as much. With the growing experience of living 10x as long you'd probably contribute much more than 10x as much.
Except that most people would live to gather the wisdom of 1 year, 1000 times, instead the experience of 1000 years. Seriously, after a couple years as a hotel room clerk, gas station attendant, bank teller, assembly line worker, stripper, waiter or waitress, etc., how much more do you learn? Or, if this had appeared 1000 years ago, how much would you get from the doctor who spent 850 years convinced that bleeding someone treated anything (except porpheria), the farmer who could run a team of oxen but thought that horse collars were new-fangled (ignoring tractors, or no-till techniques), or the sailor who spent most of his life on single-masted square-sailed ships with oars but now worked on roll-on-roll-off transports?
Redefining Marxist-Leninist Communism as a religion, which therefore frees atheists from its sins, is ridiculous sophistry.
And these moslems in Andalucia got into their controlling position by free elections, I suppose? In fact, I would question whether they were ever in the majority, let alone when they conquered it.
Furthermore, aristotle-dude neglected the invasions of Egypt, which was overwhelmingly Christian (as well as a part of the Roman Empire [the part usually called Byzantine by the modern West]), and the rest of North Africa, as well as Syria, Palestine, whatever they called modern-day Jordan at the time, etc., as well as subsequent invasions of the Imperial heartlands in what is now called Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, etc.
Complaining that the Christians were not as cultured as the Moslems, and therefore had no right to defense or counter-attack, is not only absurd (since the Roman Empire in Constantinople certainly put the best of Islam to shame, in that respect), but implies that the Nazis had the right to invade anyplace because there were more and better orchestras in Germany than insert-your-victim-here.
Atheism is a necessary part of (Leninist-style, at least) communism, according to most of its official ideologues. Further, they killed some religious believers who were otherwise not objecting to other communist doctrines such as state ownership of all means of production. Therefore, the communists killed for atheism.
At least some of them. OTOH, communists also executed people for choosing their ancestors poorly (the Czars minor children, frex). Sometimes, the communists executed people for backing the wrong communists in the competition for power among themselves. Basically, communists were not good people, at least in large numbers or state apparatuses, although I expect that a few were, as individuals.
Stalin did NOT collect stamps. This lack of stamp collecting was of course the main reason his leadership led to some much death and suffering. We must immediately promote stamp collecting to stop this sort of grievous crime from every happening again.
Did he ever speak or write, objecting to the hoarding of stamps as a sign of counter-revolutionary activity? If not, I would question your second premise.
> but certainly one cannot be executed for leaving their religion
One certainly can; whether one should be is an entirely different matter.