Donating money might well fix the problem, but I'm pretty confident that we'll get the story again until the end of time.
Slashdot should fund this by offering subscribers the ability to block dupes for an extra $2/month, and sending the proceeeds to NetBSD. Of course, we'd probably get articles about that new feature every 2-4 weeks...
If you're going to be that paranoid about keystroke loggers, it might be worth taking a look at http://www.keyghost.com/ - normal keyboards with built-in hardware keystroke loggers.
Knoppix won't help with that. I suppose you could bring your own keyboard, but at some point it's probably just easier to use a Palm Pilot with a keyboard and an ethernet card.
Myself, I have no problem with advertisers putting irritating ads on web sites. If you want to put a big noisy add on your site, and I choose to visit your site, it's your right to put whatever you want on it.
However, it's my computer, and it's just as much my right to tell it to download/render whatever I tell it to, as long as I have legal access to it.
Using the web is very much like a Darwinian environment, where one's rights extend no further than one's own equiptment. If your web site can't make it because the users are blocking ads, too bad. You should've made it more interesting, or at least figured out a way to get past the ad blocking tools.
But, you have no moral high ground to stand upon if you don't stay on top of the game. Conversely, users have little right to complain if they're getting blasted by ads on web sites that they choose to go to. It's easy to fix, with firefox and a few extensions, and if that doesn't fix it, simply don't visit that site.
This may not be a popular point of view, but the simplest way to avoid dealing with this problem is to simply stop, walk away, and don't watch broadcast TV. I'm not some hippy-liberal-TV-is-evil type - it's just too much of a PITA for me to deal with commercials, broadcast flags, tivo hacking, paying for cable, etc. If I want to watch something, I either wait until it comes out on DVD, download it via bittorrent, or simply find something better to do. TV's just not that exciting, if you compare it to real-world entertainment. Play some paintball/airsoft, go hiking, do martial arts, go clubbing and meet girls, etc. I haven't watched broadcast TV in about three years, not from dogma, but just because the cost/benefit doesn't cut it anymore.
The disk cloning tool included in the CD, g4l, looks like a ripoff of g4u, right down to the variable names. No credit is given to the author of g4u, and he isn't very happy about the situation. More details on his web site. To me, it seems to set a very poor example when the open source community engages in such blatant intellectual property rights violations.
This is a really good point, one that as far as I can tell nobody else has made. I've met my share of clueless people, and they often get confrontational if you push them around. I can imagine that if people gave me a lot of crap, even if they knew that it was for a good reason, I'd probably respond quite vocally.
The thing is, is that there's really no point to all of this. As soon as it became clear that Shifman wasn't actually going to sue, they should have either defused the situation as you recommended (if he was still willing to accept that), or simply killfiled him. It's fun to watch, but there's really no intellectual challange to outsmarting a person who's so clearly ignorant.
Slightly off topic, but I'm sure that Apple's got more to release tomorrow than just this iMac. Specifically, you can see a (blurry) picture of something that Jobs is going to show of, at http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
I can't tell what it is. It might just be another iPod, but I'll speculate that it's another "Digital Lifestyle" device, perhaps a demo unit of something like Danger sells. I believe that Apple's buying Danger, so this is possible.
I think that the point here is that any company with such policies isn't worth working at. That said, I know that the job market is tight. One may need to put up with a stupid company, especially for a first job.
Back on subject, though, I think that lying is a poor idea. It's likely to catch up with you eventually, and then you'll have more problems than you started with. Unless you're desperate, of course, but the poster didn't seem to be starving.
Y'know, if the FBI can get enough access to a room to plant something inside a keyboard, then they can probably also plant a tiny little IR sensor somewhere on the wall. If it's sensitive enough, then it'll just pick up the IR signals from the keyboard. Also, I suspect that with so heavy a unit, one could probably cut a hole in the bottom, and it'd be a long time before anybody noticed. Still, I agree with the general design philospophy. A few changes, and it'd be useful.
While I agree that Microsoft exaberates the problem through poor design, I think that the problem is really in that the general Windows user base is much less well educated in computer use than the Linux user base is. I strongly suspect that a worm/virus such as the one you describe in your example which first checked permissions, and then spat out a "This application must be run as user root" message would have similarly destructive effects upon the uneducated beginning Linux users out there, as a normal VBScript worm does under Windows, by asking you to open the attachment. People trust things that their friends send them, and don't think about it at all. If the worm/virus gave simple instructions on how to su, that'd likely be the end of that computer.
If you or I were to get so suspicous a file under Win9X, we probably simply wouldn't open it. It's a pain to be restricted by the OS, but without being big brotherish (I know, it's coming), Microsoft can't protect people from themselves. The only way to do that would be to only allow windows (by default, anyway) to only run MS signed software. That'd be a Very Bad Thing for non-MS software companies and developers, but it'd stop stuff like this dead in it's tracks. Just make the signature-only feature hard enough to disable, and no one who knows how to disable it will be stupid enough to run trojans. Problem solved.
That said, I don't think that it's worth the damage that this feature would do altogether. Therefor, this is something that we're going to have to deal with until people become better educated in computer usage, which will probably take a long time if it ever happens at all.
Glad to comment: there will be no such problem, because of the spread of the beam. Birds aren't going to spend years flying through it, anyway.
If you read up on the subject, you'll find that the distribution of the beam makes the energy levels at any given point very low. It's not like a laser, in which the beam is focused, but rather is recieved at a large antenna farm.
In short, the birds aren't going to get hurt, and any potential long-term risks are much less than those of any alternatives.
This is somewhat offtopic, but where does one get such replacements? I haven't been able to find them anywhere. See, the replacement that I fashioned out of an eraser works, but it's a bit too smooth, and it keeps falling off.
Unless someone is lucky enough to have exactly the same setup as they provide you with, everyone ought to be at equal disadvantage for not being used to the mouse/keyboard/monitor/whatever.
I'm sure it would create a lot of administrative hastle, and wouldn't fix everything, but perhaps a selection of mice and keyboards could be made available? Not at the door, but if people were given some options at registration time, it might be feasible, and might reduce the difficulty in adapting. (Unless you prefer some offbeat mouse that's not on the list.)
Well, Given that they're all networked, an obvious option would be to have a machine monitor the executable file filesizes (across the network) to make sure that nothing changes.
If they're really concerned, they could run CRC checks on the game files, but that would take an awful lot of effort, time, and processing power, not to mention network bandwidth.
A simple, non technological measure, would be to have people switch computers every few hours. (They're all the same anyway, right?) Simply don't announce it ahead of time, and if the person who gets a machine next does better than they have all day, look at the files over the network.
Honestly, I can't see how someone could alter the game if your suggestion of disallowing internet access and restricting disk usage was followed. (By not having floppy/cd drives in the machines, for example.)
I'm the not-so-proud owner of a parallel port ZIP drive, and though I've never had any trouble with it (besides it's horribly, horribly slow write speeds), I would feel very sorry for anyone who was offered this insultingly low settlement.
I got the letter about the settlement, and to get the $40 rebate, you have to buy a 250MB zip drive and six disks. Otherwise, you get a rebate of $17.50 to buy one Zip250, and only $12.50 for the 100 meg version.
Frankly, that sucks. I could probably find a better rebate at Office Depot, and I have no interest at all in buying a product that stores less than a CD-RW, writes slower than a CD-RW, and is less readable than a CD-RW, especially if said product is many times more expensive than a CD-RW.
That's quite fascinating. I had no idea, but thanks for correcting me! That'll be quite useful.
Do you happen to know if the same can be done with FreeBSD for the 68k? My school's been having trouble getting a good bootloader to work on those (old, unreliable, crummy, 603e based) Macs that Apple sold schools in the mid 90's.
The problem with most of the solutions that have been described, is that they're MacOS specific, meaning that they won't load Linux (I'm not sure about OS X), because Linux doesn't have a blessed System Folder.
What you need is a program called a bootloader. There are a good number of them for the Mac, and since you can find one for your needs on Google, I won't post any links here, because I don't have enough personal experience to recommend one.
What a bootloader will do, is pop up a menu on startup asking you which partition or OS you want to boot into. LILO (for X86) does this on a command line, but Mac boot loaders tend to be graphical.
I believe that Yellow Dog Linux comes with a bootloader that you can use to boot into Linux and MacOS, but I'm not sure about how it deals with OS X. Presumably, you could use it for any OS, since it doesn't actually interface with the OS, but rather simply points the bootstrap process at which partition to use.
One warning - bootloaders can be difficult to get rid of. When you install them, make sure that you know how to change things back, or you could be stuck with your changes. Also, if you don't know what you're doing, you could render your machine unbootable. So read up on it before installing. Good luck!
A number of people have put up the question as to whether this is legitimate. Anyone with any familiarity with the way that file compression works, or with/.'s April Fool's behavior, knows that this isn't.
However, I would point anyone with any questions to the actual file on SourceForge. The "lzip" file contained within is a picture of a sock monkey with a banana. This should be a pretty clear indication, even to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about Linux, file compression, or/., that this is, in fact, a joke.
When Everything started, I always assumed that it would meet the same fate as all internet discussion boards seem to - no meaningful signal-to-noise ratio. Slashdot and K5 do fairly well, but you have to read at a pretty high rating level to eliminate all of the crap that you normally find.
Everything, on the other hand, outright gets rid of the stupidest posts. The format also isn't conducive to stupid posts, as they'll never be referenced to.
A weblog site, like/., K5, or any of the many others, could be designed around the same rather decentralized hierarchy, allowing any user at all to post articles, similarly to K5's design (I'm going to get moderated down for criticizing/., I'm sure), but without even a real main page - users would just search for what they're interested in.
For example, one might search for most recent articles that're rated above x and have at least x responses, or something along those lines.
Just an idea, and one that I don't have time to implement. I just thought I'd throw it out there as a thought.
With 100mbps internet access, I think that we'll see a huge inflation in the size of content, and a much lesser focus on efficient web design, similar to how Windows (and Gnome/KDE, mind you) require fairly fast processors, whereas the Amiga or MacOS 6 or 7 required almost nothing and do nearly everything that today's interfaces do. It encourages waste.
Another likely effect will be the increased use of hosted applications, whether for good or bad. Myself, I think that hosted applications are just a good way of squeezing more money out of people, but that's just me.
Finally, if everybody ends up with 100mbps access at home, then it'll pretty much spell doom for wireless internet access, as content providers scale up their bandwidth requirements to meet the home customers, and wireless connections that seem obscenely fast (2mbps) by current standards become outdated before they're even introduced.
As one who was at the protest on Tuesday, (but not in the riot), I must first say that some of the claims that news media has made are false: 1. The protest was well organized. It was not the disorganized mass that it has been described as. 2. It was peacefull, for the most part. I, personally, saw no violence at all, and I marched the whole time. I could go on, but more important then the spectacle of what happened is the fact that all manner of people were working together. Labor unions and environmentalists were working together. Greenpeace and loggers were actually walking alongside eachother. This level of cooperation amoung such diverse groups has not been seen since the 1920's, when labor conditions were so bad in the United States that there was really no other choice. The stock market in this time period was, remarkably, very similar. Most stocks were inflated wildly above their "real" prices, and most stock-related profits were made by trading, not by the company who issued the stock giving you some percentage of their profit. The people of the world can now show this solidarity because of the tremendous threat posed by the WTO's policies. If the WTO is allowed to pass laws as it pleases, it will invalidate our constitution, and we'll have no legal recourse against it. Here's why: 1. The MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) specifies that if a law of ours causes a foreign company to loose money, we can either compensate them for this loss for an indefinite period, or we can remove the law from our books. This is happening in the state of California at the moment, on the subject of a gasoline additive. 2. With this power invoked, we will be at the mercy of anonymous, non-elected international panels who will, in secret (if requested to do so), review our laws, and tell us to change them if they pose a problem for some company. For example, if X-Oil company were allowed, in another country, to refine oil by methods that leak ungodly amounts of pollutants into the water and ground, but were not allowed to do so in their refineries in the Puget Sound, then the US government (or whoever sets their pollution standards) would be required to change the pollution laws, or to compensate them for the extra cost, forever. 3. This could nullify our constitution because nearly every article could, conceivably, cause some company, somewhere, hardship, and could thus be negated by the WTO laws. I could drone on forever with more examples of the terrible things that could happen if the WTO is allowed to have it's way, but that'll bore everybody. Instead, I'd like everybody to think about what happened near the end of the 1920's, ending the ramant inflation of stock values. The stock market crashed. Lots of people starved. Everybody lost their money. A few people became very wealthy (i.e. the ones who won out on the savings-and-loans scandal.), but not very many. In the end, we ended up instituting a series of worker protection laws, which have been chipped away at since then. We shouldn't have to go through another depression before we fix the problem, this time. Some simple preventive measures, some of which could be having the WTO require a reasonable minimum wage, require strict environmental controls, and set some maximum working hours for workers. Others would be neccessary, of course, but that's a start.
Slashdot Mirror
Donating money might well fix the problem, but I'm pretty confident that we'll get the story again until the end of time.
Slashdot should fund this by offering subscribers the ability to block dupes for an extra $2/month, and sending the proceeeds to NetBSD. Of course, we'd probably get articles about that new feature every 2-4 weeks...
If you're going to be that paranoid about keystroke loggers, it might be worth taking a look at http://www.keyghost.com/ - normal keyboards with built-in hardware keystroke loggers.
Knoppix won't help with that. I suppose you could bring your own keyboard, but at some point it's probably just easier to use a Palm Pilot with a keyboard and an ethernet card.
Myself, I have no problem with advertisers putting irritating ads on web sites. If you want to put a big noisy add on your site, and I choose to visit your site, it's your right to put whatever you want on it.
However, it's my computer, and it's just as much my right to tell it to download/render whatever I tell it to, as long as I have legal access to it.
Using the web is very much like a Darwinian environment, where one's rights extend no further than one's own equiptment. If your web site can't make it because the users are blocking ads, too bad. You should've made it more interesting, or at least figured out a way to get past the ad blocking tools.
But, you have no moral high ground to stand upon if you don't stay on top of the game. Conversely, users have little right to complain if they're getting blasted by ads on web sites that they choose to go to. It's easy to fix, with firefox and a few extensions, and if that doesn't fix it, simply don't visit that site.
This may not be a popular point of view, but the simplest way to avoid dealing with this problem is to simply stop, walk away, and don't watch broadcast TV.
I'm not some hippy-liberal-TV-is-evil type - it's just too much of a PITA for me to deal with commercials, broadcast flags, tivo hacking, paying for cable, etc. If I want to watch something, I either wait until it comes out on DVD, download it via bittorrent, or simply find something better to do.
TV's just not that exciting, if you compare it to real-world entertainment. Play some paintball/airsoft, go hiking, do martial arts, go clubbing and meet girls, etc. I haven't watched broadcast TV in about three years, not from dogma, but just because the cost/benefit doesn't cut it anymore.
Pure speculation, but I'm curious whether a computer gamer with a high-end sound system, turned up fairly loud, would trigger the gunshot sensor.
The disk cloning tool included in the CD, g4l, looks like a ripoff of g4u, right down to the variable names.
No credit is given to the author of g4u, and he isn't very happy about the situation. More details on his web site.
To me, it seems to set a very poor example when the open source community engages in such blatant intellectual property rights violations.
This is a really good point, one that as far as I can tell nobody else has made. I've met my share of clueless people, and they often get confrontational if you push them around. I can imagine that if people gave me a lot of crap, even if they knew that it was for a good reason, I'd probably respond quite vocally.
The thing is, is that there's really no point to all of this. As soon as it became clear that Shifman wasn't actually going to sue, they should have either defused the situation as you recommended (if he was still willing to accept that), or simply killfiled him. It's fun to watch, but there's really no intellectual challange to outsmarting a person who's so clearly ignorant.
Slightly off topic, but I'm sure that Apple's got more to release tomorrow than just this iMac. Specifically, you can see a (blurry) picture of something that Jobs is going to show of, at http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
I can't tell what it is. It might just be another iPod, but I'll speculate that it's another "Digital Lifestyle" device, perhaps a demo unit of something like Danger sells. I believe that Apple's buying Danger, so this is possible.
I think that the point here is that any company with such policies isn't worth working at. That said, I know that the job market is tight. One may need to put up with a stupid company, especially for a first job.
Back on subject, though, I think that lying is a poor idea. It's likely to catch up with you eventually, and then you'll have more problems than you started with. Unless you're desperate, of course, but the poster didn't seem to be starving.
Y'know, if the FBI can get enough access to a room to plant something inside a keyboard, then they can probably also plant a tiny little IR sensor somewhere on the wall. If it's sensitive enough, then it'll just pick up the IR signals from the keyboard. Also, I suspect that with so heavy a unit, one could probably cut a hole in the bottom, and it'd be a long time before anybody noticed. Still, I agree with the general design philospophy. A few changes, and it'd be useful.
While I agree that Microsoft exaberates the problem through poor design, I think that the problem is really in that the general Windows user base is much less well educated in computer use than the Linux user base is. I strongly suspect that a worm/virus such as the one you describe in your example which first checked permissions, and then spat out a "This application must be run as user root" message would have similarly destructive effects upon the uneducated beginning Linux users out there, as a normal VBScript worm does under Windows, by asking you to open the attachment. People trust things that their friends send them, and don't think about it at all. If the worm/virus gave simple instructions on how to su, that'd likely be the end of that computer.
If you or I were to get so suspicous a file under Win9X, we probably simply wouldn't open it. It's a pain to be restricted by the OS, but without being big brotherish (I know, it's coming), Microsoft can't protect people from themselves. The only way to do that would be to only allow windows (by default, anyway) to only run MS signed software. That'd be a Very Bad Thing for non-MS software companies and developers, but it'd stop stuff like this dead in it's tracks. Just make the signature-only feature hard enough to disable, and no one who knows how to disable it will be stupid enough to run trojans. Problem solved.
That said, I don't think that it's worth the damage that this feature would do altogether. Therefor, this is something that we're going to have to deal with until people become better educated in computer usage, which will probably take a long time if it ever happens at all.
Glad to comment: there will be no such problem, because of the spread of the beam. Birds aren't going to spend years flying through it, anyway.
If you read up on the subject, you'll find that the distribution of the beam makes the energy levels at any given point very low. It's not like a laser, in which the beam is focused, but rather is recieved at a large antenna farm.
In short, the birds aren't going to get hurt, and any potential long-term risks are much less than those of any alternatives.
This is somewhat offtopic, but where does one get such replacements? I haven't been able to find them anywhere. See, the replacement that I fashioned out of an eraser works, but it's a bit too smooth, and it keeps falling off.
Unless someone is lucky enough to have exactly the same setup as they provide you with, everyone ought to be at equal disadvantage for not being used to the mouse/keyboard/monitor/whatever.
I'm sure it would create a lot of administrative hastle, and wouldn't fix everything, but perhaps a selection of mice and keyboards could be made available? Not at the door, but if people were given some options at registration time, it might be feasible, and might reduce the difficulty in adapting. (Unless you prefer some offbeat mouse that's not on the list.)
Well, Given that they're all networked, an obvious option would be to have a machine monitor the executable file filesizes (across the network) to make sure that nothing changes.
If they're really concerned, they could run CRC checks on the game files, but that would take an awful lot of effort, time, and processing power, not to mention network bandwidth.
A simple, non technological measure, would be to have people switch computers every few hours. (They're all the same anyway, right?) Simply don't announce it ahead of time, and if the person who gets a machine next does better than they have all day, look at the files over the network.
Honestly, I can't see how someone could alter the game if your suggestion of disallowing internet access and restricting disk usage was followed. (By not having floppy/cd drives in the machines, for example.)
I'm the not-so-proud owner of a parallel port ZIP drive, and though I've never had any trouble with it (besides it's horribly, horribly slow write speeds), I would feel very sorry for anyone who was offered this insultingly low settlement.
I got the letter about the settlement, and to get the $40 rebate, you have to buy a 250MB zip drive and six disks. Otherwise, you get a rebate of $17.50 to buy one Zip250, and only $12.50 for the 100 meg version.
Frankly, that sucks. I could probably find a better rebate at Office Depot, and I have no interest at all in buying a product that stores less than a CD-RW, writes slower than a CD-RW, and is less readable than a CD-RW, especially if said product is many times more expensive than a CD-RW.
Do you happen to know if the same can be done with FreeBSD for the 68k? My school's been having trouble getting a good bootloader to work on those (old, unreliable, crummy, 603e based) Macs that Apple sold schools in the mid 90's.
The problem with most of the solutions that have been described, is that they're MacOS specific, meaning that they won't load Linux (I'm not sure about OS X), because Linux doesn't have a blessed System Folder.
What you need is a program called a bootloader. There are a good number of them for the Mac, and since you can find one for your needs on Google, I won't post any links here, because I don't have enough personal experience to recommend one.
What a bootloader will do, is pop up a menu on startup asking you which partition or OS you want to boot into. LILO (for X86) does this on a command line, but Mac boot loaders tend to be graphical.
I believe that Yellow Dog Linux comes with a bootloader that you can use to boot into Linux and MacOS, but I'm not sure about how it deals with OS X. Presumably, you could use it for any OS, since it doesn't actually interface with the OS, but rather simply points the bootstrap process at which partition to use.
One warning - bootloaders can be difficult to get rid of. When you install them, make sure that you know how to change things back, or you could be stuck with your changes. Also, if you don't know what you're doing, you could render your machine unbootable. So read up on it before installing. Good luck!
A number of people have put up the question as to whether this is legitimate. Anyone with any familiarity with the way that file compression works, or with /.'s April Fool's behavior, knows that this isn't.
However, I would point anyone with any questions to the actual file on SourceForge. The "lzip" file contained within is a picture of a sock monkey with a banana. This should be a pretty clear indication, even to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about Linux, file compression, or /., that this is, in fact, a joke.
When Everything started, I always assumed that it would meet the same fate as all internet discussion boards seem to - no meaningful signal-to-noise ratio. Slashdot and K5 do fairly well, but you have to read at a pretty high rating level to eliminate all of the crap that you normally find.
Everything, on the other hand, outright gets rid of the stupidest posts. The format also isn't conducive to stupid posts, as they'll never be referenced to.
A weblog site, like /., K5, or any of the many others, could be designed around the same rather decentralized hierarchy, allowing any user at all to post articles, similarly to K5's design (I'm going to get moderated down for criticizing /., I'm sure), but without even a real main page - users would just search for what they're interested in.
For example, one might search for most recent articles that're rated above x and have at least x responses, or something along those lines.
Just an idea, and one that I don't have time to implement. I just thought I'd throw it out there as a thought.
With 100mbps internet access, I think that we'll see a huge inflation in the size of content, and a much lesser focus on efficient web design, similar to how Windows (and Gnome/KDE, mind you) require fairly fast processors, whereas the Amiga or MacOS 6 or 7 required almost nothing and do nearly everything that today's interfaces do. It encourages waste.
Another likely effect will be the increased use of hosted applications, whether for good or bad. Myself, I think that hosted applications are just a good way of squeezing more money out of people, but that's just me.
Finally, if everybody ends up with 100mbps access at home, then it'll pretty much spell doom for wireless internet access, as content providers scale up their bandwidth requirements to meet the home customers, and wireless connections that seem obscenely fast (2mbps) by current standards become outdated before they're even introduced.
As one who was at the protest on Tuesday, (but not in the riot), I must first say that some of the claims that news media has made are false:
1. The protest was well organized. It was not the disorganized mass that it has been described as.
2. It was peacefull, for the most part. I, personally, saw no violence at all, and I marched the whole time.
I could go on, but more important then the spectacle of what happened is the fact that all manner of people were working together. Labor unions and environmentalists were working together. Greenpeace and loggers were actually walking alongside eachother. This level of cooperation amoung such diverse groups has not been seen since the 1920's, when labor conditions were so bad in the United States that there was really no other choice. The stock market in this time period was, remarkably, very similar. Most stocks were inflated wildly above their "real" prices, and most stock-related profits were made by trading, not by the company who issued the stock giving you some percentage of their profit.
The people of the world can now show this solidarity because of the tremendous threat posed by the WTO's policies. If the WTO is allowed to pass laws as it pleases, it will invalidate our constitution, and we'll have no legal recourse against it. Here's why:
1. The MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) specifies that if a law of ours causes a foreign company to loose money, we can either compensate them for this loss for an indefinite period, or we can remove the law from our books. This is happening in the state of California at the moment, on the subject of a gasoline additive.
2. With this power invoked, we will be at the mercy of anonymous, non-elected international panels who will, in secret (if requested to do so), review our laws, and tell us to change them if they pose a problem for some company. For example, if X-Oil company were allowed, in another country, to refine oil by methods that leak ungodly amounts of pollutants into the water and ground, but were not allowed to do so in their refineries in the Puget Sound, then the US government (or whoever sets their pollution standards) would be required to change the pollution laws, or to compensate them for the extra cost, forever.
3. This could nullify our constitution because nearly every article could, conceivably, cause some company, somewhere, hardship, and could thus be negated by the WTO laws.
I could drone on forever with more examples of the terrible things that could happen if the WTO is allowed to have it's way, but that'll bore everybody. Instead, I'd like everybody to think about what happened near the end of the 1920's, ending the ramant inflation of stock values. The stock market crashed. Lots of people starved. Everybody lost their money. A few people became very wealthy (i.e. the ones who won out on the savings-and-loans scandal.), but not very many. In the end, we ended up instituting a series of worker protection laws, which have been chipped away at since then.
We shouldn't have to go through another depression before we fix the problem, this time. Some simple preventive measures, some of which could be having the WTO require a reasonable minimum wage, require strict environmental controls, and set some maximum working hours for workers. Others would be neccessary, of course, but that's a start.