The Arc thing was a steal from The Hitchhikers' Guide and was intended to be sort of sarcastic parody. In the original, a planet's sun was supposed to go nova. All of the "really important" people fought for a place on the B Arc and were blasted into space. Then it was discovered that the sun was not going to go nova. Life on that planet was greatly improved for everyone else. The B Arc wandered thru space, and eventually wound up settling a planet later identified as Earth.
What we need is to construct a collection of arcs to rescue important parts of the population.
The A Arc would be used to protect the president and a few important government officials. The B Arc would rescue essential civilian leaders and members of the.0001%.. The C Arcs when finally constructed, would rescue the rest of us.
I should have saved a link, but somewhere in the last month or so I recall a story that described how spying on factory farms had been defined in law as a form of terrorism. I didn't pay enough attention because lately everything is being redefined as some kind of terrorism. As I vaguely remember it, the offense involved trespassing on private property. Unfortunately you will have to check this out for yourselves if you are interested.
This is a military high command that not only re-floated their sunken fleet, but which told Von Rippers subordinates to ignore his orders and to do it "their way" - and those subordinates did just that. Von Ripper quit for that reason.
If anyone studied the results, I'm very sure they got the lesson and kept their mouths shut.
After the Revolutionary War we were left with the constitution of the First United States Republic, the Articles of Confederation. It wasn't much of a constitution for the simple reason that it wasn't much of a government. There was no president except for the ceremonial office of President of the Congress. There was no federal court let alone a Supreme Court.
The states were mostly independent - of the federal government and of each other. The confederation was more of an organized rabble except that each state ran it's own affairs in about the same way that the British government had run things. The federal government such as it was had no power to do more than beg the states for revenue.
It was a living enactment of "that government is best that governs least".
There was a problem with the common people. The pre-revolutionary smugglers were now "legitimate" merchants and they were busy foreclosing on the people who actually fought in the revolution. See Daniel Shays for the details. The US aristocracy was scared silly that the common man might actually gain some control over his own government (As they did in Rhode Island, by voting not revolution.)
The common people staged a revolution called Shays' Rebellion. The merchants and bankers hired mercenaries. The rebels were beaten down but eventually pardoned after swearing never to do it again.
This was a problem in the minds of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and to some degree in the mind of John Adams. They didn't want a government that governs least, they wanted a government that could get things done - an imperial government. The French and the British had empires, and Alexander Hamilton wanted one for himself. They also had navies - and Alexander Hamilton wanted to be an Admiral.
But you can't run an empire with a rag-tag collection of states that weren't too sure about a federal government in the first place.
Washington, Adams and Hamilton (with the help of a front group called the Society of the Cincinati) tried to put together a constitution that George Bush would have loved.
The leftovers in Massachusetts refused to ratify the new constitution without "reservattions" which turned out to be the Bill of Rights. A number of othe states did the same.
Washington and Hamilton had to settle for something less than the Roman Republic they seemed to want. And when they got their new constitution, they proceeded to ignore the Bill of Rights as in the Alien and Sedition Acts.
So what was our country meant to be - the free country desired by Shays' Rebels - or the Empire desired by Washington and Hamilton?
How would you feel if you discovered that the company that provides and maintains the cameras had modified the timing of the lights to increase the number of people photographed as red-light runners. Some of them were a little sloppy in their cheating, got caught and were run out of town. There are probably a few companies that were a little more careful in their cheating and haven't been caught yet.
We live in a world where "shareholder value" is more important than honesty.
Regulation fails largely because we do not know when or how to regulate.
Before everything went to hell, the mortgage industry regulated itself very nicely for one simple real-world reason - the investors did not trust the originating bankers any further than they could throw them. (This is semi-historical so don't confuse the way it was with the way it has become.)
Bankers used to write loans out of their own (depositors) funds. They knew their customers and they knew who was good and who was no so good)
Investors knew this and if a bank wanted to sell a bunch of loans, they wanted enough documentation to make sure that the bank wasn't going to sell them the junk and keep the good stuff for their own portfolio. When they bought a loan, they also had buy-back provisions. The originating banker had to keep a reserve fund, and if a loan was bad from the start, the originator had to buy it back - and the reserve fund meant that they had to put up enough cash to show they were able to buy it back.
Fannie May and Freddie Mac insured loans. They charged a fee and they had their own set of rules. They didn't trust the originating bankers or the investors either. At his time, Fannie Mae and Freddia Mac were still private companies even though they were sponsored by the federal government.
Notice the there is no government regulation anywhere here - just independent businesses who know how crooked the people they are dealing with can be.
But regulation costs money. These guys were making their own regulations and making just enough regulations to cover their own butts. If they got skinned anyway, they added a few new rules - just enough to fix the problem.
This is business taking care of themselves. This doesn't protect the public. So you still need some regulation, but not the kind of clusterfuck that the regulatory agencies usually create.
Since the government isn't paying for regulation out of it's own pocket, there is no limit to the number of really stupid regulations they are likely to pass. And because they don't really know what they are doing, business is usually able to turn that stupidity to their own advantage.
The one thing I have not been able to find out here is whether the high salaries are an actual salary, or the billed costs of a consulting firm. If these are billed costs, divide by three (or more) to find out what the programmers were actually paid. And then consider that this is New York - where a parking space costs more than an apartment in most other cities.
Maybe I missed it and someone already said this, but the way warranties work is defined by the Uniform Commercial Code - and not necessarily to our benefit.
If a software developer were to provide a printed warranty - sort of like: "If it doesn't work correctly we will fix the problem and give you a free copy of the revised version", the developer has just printed his own suicide note.
You can't write a simple commonsense warranty because of a legal doctrine called strict liability. If you give any warranty at all, you have automatically imported an entire body of law that governs warranties.
That is why most software products refuse to even guarantee that the CD will fit in the drive or that the computer will not catch fire during installation.
I really wish I knew the entire story about Dell, but this simplified version has a certain amount of truth. It goes like this:
Dell was a pretty well run company over it's 20 or so year life span. They made a respectable profit.
Then the Wall Street analysts decided that per-share earnings should be about 50 percent higher. When Wall Street demands more money on the bottom line, smart managers either pay attention or dust off their resumes.
There are only a few ways to increase those earnings:
1) Cheapen the product 2) Screw over the employees - fire some, overwork others, steal the pension plan - all the traditional ways. 3) Reduce customer support to almost nothing.
This isn't done in one step. You can generally go though 3 or 4 rounds of each of these before it becomes obvious that you have screwed the pooch.
In one of these iterations, Dell exported customer support and order handling to India - and apparently not to the best firm they could have picked..
When too many of their newly cheapened machines showed up DOA, all of the people who knew how to fix the problems were gone. A customer service department that took 20 years to build was now toast. If you were one of the customers with a dead machine, the chance of getting the problem solved was close to zero.
This of course mean that marketing stopped working as the word got out.
Then they cut a marketing deal with Wal-Mart. It took them a while to figure out that when you make a marketing deal With Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is the only one who makes any money.
Selling off their manufacturing will put a one-time addition to "earnings", and with any luck, all of the smart guys in management will have bailed out.
This one sort of relates to step 4: After you have totally trashed the company, lie on your financial statements while looking carefully for the Exit sign.
And in the mean time, the Wall St guys and the portfolio managers cashed their bonus checks and are now saying: "tsk, tsk - isn't it a shame".
Your response bothers me. It's what happens when people put ideology ahead of common sense and facts.
Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.
This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.
In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.
This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.
And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.
Actually, the original participants were debriefed. They were also asked detailed questions about what they did and how they felt about it.
That was probably the most chilling part of the original report. A large number of participants described themselves as feeling incredibly conflicted - they hated what they had been doing but felt compelled to continue.
And by the way, before the original experiments were performed, a "blue-ribbon" panel of psychologists was asked about the possible ethical effects on the ones giving the shocks. The panel believed that only about 15% of those tested would continue with the shocks and that 15% would be made up of degenerates who would not be bothered by their own actions. The 15% were present and they generally found a way to blame it on the victim. The other 65% who ramped the voltage up to the max at least felt bad about it.
Just as an ethical test: When Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was deported to Syria and tortured - how many of those here (who are so concerned about ethics) bothered to write their congressman. How many actually feel bad about our government's actions - assuming they even noticed - now that the Canadian government has apologized to Arar.
Part II of Milgram's conclusions described the situation where responsibility is divided up between many actors. One person makes up the list of Jews. Another rounds up the Jews and takes them to the train station. A third loaded them on the train...
Under those circumstances, Milgram concluded that there was almost no chance that any of the parties would have any chance of resisting authority.
In some ways, the Milgram experiments led to the most significant scientific result of the century. To the best of my knowledge, they have never been repeated, elaborated or followed up with additional studies.
Ethics = someone did not want you to know.
The most hopeful result of the original experiments was the response of a young German biology student. When her part of the experiment was explained to her, she looked the experimenter in the eye and said "This is not right! And I will not cooperate".
An interesting thread. Everyone has an opinion. So just to confuse things, I thought I's throw in a few facts. After the revolution, one of the more interesting historical events at the time was Shay's rebellion which occurred in 1786 - prior to the ratification of the constitution and well before the Bill of Rights.
"During an economic depression, with farm prices low and foreign markets closed, the state government was taxing the farmers (payable in hard money only) to pay wealthy eastern creditors who had lent depreciated paper (accepted at full face value) to the state government for bonds during the war." - Wikipedia
In plain English, the farmers were being royally screwed by the merchants and bankers. And by the lawyers who got a cut out of the proceed of seized property.
If you care about the details, Wikipedia has a lot more information.
The rebels were not that well armed and failed to capture the armory at Springfield. They were put down by a private mercenary force, paid for by the Boston bankers.
Just to demonstrate that politics and hypocrisy never change, one of our leading revolutionaries, Samuel Adams was quoted as saying:
"In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of republic ought to suffer death".
Needless to say, it did not go well for the rebels, but in the end only two were hanged for their participation in the rebellion.
"On Nov. 13, 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to New York senator William S. Smith saying, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." - Wikipedia
If you are going to quote the founding fathers, it might be useful to do so in context. The above statements by Jefferson, so often quoted, were made in response to the failed rebellion.
Surprise! Voting is not an unalienable right. In Florida, any number of people were disenfranchised because a bogus database said that the had been guilty of a felony. In the case of some, the "date" of the felony was in the future. Many of them still can't vote.
If you want a list of your "unalienable" rights, you have to read the Supreme Court verdict in what are called the "Slaughterhouse Cases" from around 1873. The Supreme Court did not know how to deal with the concept, so it listed your "unalienable rights". You might be surprised at what they are.
A brief comment on the educational concept of "self esteem". Somewhere around the '90s, someone discovered that there were teachers (often in inner-city schools) who had zero respect for their students. They believed they were stupid or sub-standard and that is how they treated them.
Naturally the students reacted to this mostly non-verbal communication. Some just got pissed off and dropped out. Others simply stopped wanting to learn. And they didn't learn.
When the light dawned, the educational establishment made great efforts to communicate to every teacher how important self-esteem was for learning.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the part about teacher beliefs and behavior got edited out of the message. Apparently it was too painful for teachers and administrators to consider the idea that their beliefs and behavior might have an impact on the students.
So now we have the cult of "self esteem" and schools where the top fifty percent of the class gets a "My son is an honor student" sticker for the family car.
But the teachers still believe the students are stupid and the students are now insulted by a school that thinks they are too dumb to know when they are being conned.
All the teachers ever had to do was change their own behavior and attitudes.
So finally, after 1233 inane messages, the LA Times introduces some reality - and some new unreality - into the discussion.
We have a police officer with a past history of problems with violence (and who is himself a minority) carrying a taser because the university was concerned with his use of a nightstick on one person and his use of a gun in the shooting of a homeless man.
The facts may be subject to more endless debate, but the LA Times report says that he was suspended for 90 days for the incident where he used the nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on the street in front of a fraternity house.
You could make a reasonable hypothesis that tasers were purchased at UCLA because someone was concerned about the use of guns and nightsticks by their police.
"Tabatabainejad's attorney, Stephen Yagman, said his client was shocked five times with the Taser after he refused to show his ID because he thought he was being singled out for his Middle Eastern appearance". (Remember that the officer with the Taser was NOT the person who originally asked for ID and who then called the police.)
Considering the rampant paranoia throughout our society, there are any number of American citizens of middle-eastern decent who probably feel degraded and threatened. (Among other incidents, they threw a couple of Hindus off an airplane because other passengers were frightened by their appearance.)
It may not excuse acting like an asshole, but it does sort of explain it.
To reject IP as a legal fiction only leads us back to a terrifying fact
that all property is, in essence, a lie. But it is a useful lie, which is why
we Civilized People argue for it so strongly. If Disney has no right to protect
its DVDs, what right do you have to your house? I'm sure the world's millions
of homeless would like an answer.
What do you do when it stops being a useful lie.
Samuel Clemens was one of the authors who strongly advocated copyright protection.
Pirates were publishing his books in Europe before the press run was completed
in the States. He was being robbed and he knew it. Copyright was not only useful
but necessary.
We passed a useful lie to protect individual authors. How useful is
it when the system is set up so that the authors and musicians are screwed out
of their copyrights before they can be published.
How useful is it when a music corporation can bribe a congressional aide to
modify a bill that has already been passed -- in order to "clarify"
it in favor of the industry
Maybe we need a different lie. Maybe we need a lie that protects the
creators against the pirates and the corporations.
And morons who do not read the post are even more annoying.
If my previous ISP had simply gone out of business that would be a shame.
And yes -- if mindsprung bought my account, they also bought the obligation to deliver the service.
The actual issue is small words is: "What kind of idiot, sets you up a new e-mail account (and sends you a bill to that account) without ever informing you that the account exists."
After three days of no outgoing e-mail thru Primenet (an aquisition of Global Crossing) and a recorded message that tech support was working on the sntp problems. I call up to find out that I am now a mindspring customer.
No advance notice by either e-mail or snail mail.
Naturally a change in my e-mail address is a major pita, but why fight what can't be changed?
Customer service is actually fairly competent, we presumably get the billing straightened out, and I hook up to the new e-mail account.
Unfortunately what you have stated is a contradiction in terms:
Hitler's Holocaust has thought us that terrible lesson. Only morally and socially acceptable speech should be fully allowed to be spoken freely, hateful and harmful speech should be restricted fully.
If the laws you talk about were in place in Hitler's time (for all I know they were), it would then have been 'socially unacceptable' to denounce the Nazis for genocide.
The Nazis, of course, did not really need a law to shoot anyone who disagreed with them.
Currently I'm looking at what might be done using e-gold as a method of handling mini-payments.
I'll leave the details on e-gold to your search engine.
The idea that interests me is the possibility of micropayments as low as 5 cents (possibly smaller)
with a lot more convenience than PayPal and some of the other electronic payment systems. The transaction cost is 1/2 of a percent, with a maximum transaction fee of fifty cents no matter how large the transaction.
This could allow payment for content without the need for a twenty or thirty dollar subscription when you only want to read one article or only want one-time access to the site.
I'm curious as to whether anyone else has considered this specific payment mechanism. At first glance, it seems that it allows a number of new business models that actually work.
It will definitely make your life better - until the FBI/CIA/??? subpoena the records and built a database of everyone who has watched The Matrix more than 10 times.
Ok, maybe that one is a stretch, but when you are under suspicion of thinking without a permit, do you really want the investigator to have a list of every movie you have ever watched ??
For want of anything else to do, I sent the link to the Putnam Pit
The editor, Geoff Davidian has been waging a one man war against local government corruption in his home town in Putnam County, Tennessee.
His style is outrageous enough that from time to time he has gotten some major publicity - and he has an international subscription list.
He is also sponsoring a project involving student journalists and investigative reporting. I'd be more definite, but it has been a while since I read that article.
With a small amount of encouragement, he might take an interest in this issue.
I'm not sure he was innocent, but there was some reasonable doubt that he was guilty.
From the parts that I actualy paid attention to, the defense claimed that the police lied and planted evidence. The jury believed this.
Now that half the LA Police department is under investigation for lying, planting evidence and killing people, the defense doesn't seem all that improbable.
All of the people who had made up their minds about his guilt are still convinced, and the police scandal doesn't seem to have registered.
To drag this nonsense out just a little further, I stopped believing reports about police investigations about ten years ago when Boston had the famous "silver gun killer" case.
This is a rough description but it's pretty close. A man and his wife had just gotten into their car. The man was shot in the shoulder and his wife was killed. He claimed that a black man with a silver gun did the shooting.
Lo and behold, the Boston police arrested a black man and came up with seventeen witnesses that said that he owned a silver gun and used to wave it around in restaurants.
After the autopsy determined that there was no way that the shot that killed the woman could have come from outside of the car, the seventeen or so witnesses explained that they had been threatened with loss of welfare checks, criminal prosecution, and offered various deals in order to get their testimony.
If the police had been a little smarter, they probably would have claimed that the defendent was lying underneath the car and fired upward through the floorboard.
I don't think OJ was innocent. I think I do not know.
Slashdot Mirror
The Arc thing was a steal from The Hitchhikers' Guide and was intended to be sort of sarcastic parody. In the original, a planet's sun was supposed to go nova. All of the "really important" people fought for a place on the B Arc and were blasted into space. Then it was discovered that the sun was not going to go nova. Life on that planet was greatly improved for everyone else. The B Arc wandered thru space, and eventually wound up settling a planet later identified as Earth.
What we need is to construct a collection of arcs to rescue important parts of the population.
The A Arc would be used to protect the president and a few important government officials. The B Arc would rescue essential civilian leaders and members of the .0001%.. The C Arcs when finally constructed, would rescue the rest of us.
It can be done.
I should have saved a link, but somewhere in the last month or so I recall a story that described how spying on factory farms had been defined in law as a form of terrorism. I didn't pay enough attention because lately everything is being redefined as some kind of terrorism. As I vaguely remember it, the offense involved trespassing on private property. Unfortunately you will have to check this out for yourselves if you are interested.
This is a military high command that not only re-floated their sunken fleet, but which told Von Rippers subordinates to ignore his orders and to do it "their way" - and those subordinates did just that. Von Ripper quit for that reason.
If anyone studied the results, I'm very sure they got the lesson and kept their mouths shut.
After the Revolutionary War we were left with the constitution of the First United States Republic, the Articles of Confederation. It wasn't much of a constitution for the simple reason that it wasn't much of a government. There was no president except for the ceremonial office of President of the Congress. There was no federal court let alone a Supreme Court.
The states were mostly independent - of the federal government and of each other. The confederation was more of an organized rabble except that each state ran it's own affairs in about the same way that the British government had run things. The federal government such as it was had no power to do more than beg the states for revenue.
It was a living enactment of "that government is best that governs least".
There was a problem with the common people. The pre-revolutionary smugglers were now "legitimate" merchants and they were busy foreclosing on the people who actually fought in the revolution. See Daniel Shays for the details. The US aristocracy was scared silly that the common man might actually gain some control over his own government (As they did in Rhode Island, by voting not revolution.)
The common people staged a revolution called Shays' Rebellion. The merchants and bankers hired mercenaries. The rebels were beaten down but eventually pardoned after swearing never to do it again.
This was a problem in the minds of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and to some degree in the mind of John Adams. They didn't want a government that governs least, they wanted a government that could get things done - an imperial government. The French and the British had empires, and Alexander Hamilton wanted one for himself. They also had navies - and Alexander Hamilton wanted to be an Admiral.
But you can't run an empire with a rag-tag collection of states that weren't too sure about a federal government in the first place.
Washington, Adams and Hamilton (with the help of a front group called the Society of the Cincinati) tried to put together a constitution that George Bush would have loved.
The leftovers in Massachusetts refused to ratify the new constitution without "reservattions" which turned out to be the Bill of Rights. A number of othe states did the same.
Washington and Hamilton had to settle for something less than the Roman Republic they seemed to want. And when they got their new constitution, they proceeded to ignore the Bill of Rights as in the Alien and Sedition Acts.
So what was our country meant to be - the free country desired by Shays' Rebels - or the Empire desired by Washington and Hamilton?
How would you feel if you discovered that the company that provides and maintains the cameras had modified the timing of the lights to increase the number of people photographed as red-light runners. Some of them were a little sloppy in their cheating, got caught and were run out of town. There are probably a few companies that were a little more careful in their cheating and haven't been caught yet.
We live in a world where "shareholder value" is more important than honesty.
Regulation fails largely because we do not know when or how to regulate.
Before everything went to hell, the mortgage industry regulated itself very nicely for one simple real-world reason - the investors did not trust the originating bankers any further than they could throw them. (This is semi-historical so don't confuse the way it was with the way it has become.)
Bankers used to write loans out of their own (depositors) funds. They knew their customers and they knew who was good and who was no so good)
Investors knew this and if a bank wanted to sell a bunch of loans, they wanted enough documentation to make sure that the bank wasn't going to sell them the junk and keep the good stuff for their own portfolio. When they bought a loan, they also had buy-back provisions. The originating banker had to keep a reserve fund, and if a loan was bad from the start, the originator had to buy it back - and the reserve fund meant that they had to put up enough cash to show they were able to buy it back.
Fannie May and Freddie Mac insured loans. They charged a fee and they had their own set of rules. They didn't trust the originating bankers or the investors either. At his time, Fannie Mae and Freddia Mac were still private companies even though they were sponsored by the federal government.
Notice the there is no government regulation anywhere here - just independent businesses who know how crooked the people they are dealing with can be.
But regulation costs money. These guys were making their own regulations and making just enough regulations to cover their own butts. If they got skinned anyway, they added a few new rules - just enough to fix the problem.
This is business taking care of themselves. This doesn't protect the public. So you still need some regulation, but not the kind of clusterfuck that the regulatory agencies usually create.
Since the government isn't paying for regulation out of it's own pocket, there is no limit to the number of really stupid regulations they are likely to pass. And because they don't really know what they are doing, business is usually able to turn that stupidity to their own advantage.
The one thing I have not been able to find out here is whether the high salaries are an actual salary, or the billed costs of a consulting firm. If these are billed costs, divide by three (or more) to find out what the programmers were actually paid. And then consider that this is New York - where a parking space costs more than an apartment in most other cities.
The rest of the comments seem pretty accurate.
Maybe I missed it and someone already said this, but the way warranties work is defined by the Uniform Commercial Code - and not necessarily to our benefit.
If a software developer were to provide a printed warranty - sort of like: "If it doesn't work correctly we will fix the problem and give you a free copy of the revised version", the developer has just printed his own suicide note.
You can't write a simple commonsense warranty because of a legal doctrine called strict liability. If you give any warranty at all, you have automatically imported an entire body of law that governs warranties.
That is why most software products refuse to even guarantee that the CD will fit in the drive or that the computer will not catch fire during installation.
I really wish I knew the entire story about Dell, but this simplified version has a certain amount of truth. It goes like this:
Dell was a pretty well run company over it's 20 or so year life span. They made a respectable profit.
Then the Wall Street analysts decided that per-share earnings should be about 50 percent higher. When Wall Street demands more money on the bottom line, smart managers either pay attention or dust off their resumes.
There are only a few ways to increase those earnings:
1) Cheapen the product
2) Screw over the employees - fire some, overwork others, steal the pension plan - all the traditional ways.
3) Reduce customer support to almost nothing.
This isn't done in one step. You can generally go though 3 or 4 rounds of each of these before it becomes obvious that you have screwed the pooch.
In one of these iterations, Dell exported customer support and order handling to India - and apparently not to the best firm they could have picked..
When too many of their newly cheapened machines showed up DOA, all of the people who knew how to fix the problems were gone. A customer service department that took 20 years to build was now toast. If you were one of the customers with a dead machine, the chance of getting the problem solved was close to zero.
This of course mean that marketing stopped working as the word got out.
Then they cut a marketing deal with Wal-Mart. It took them a while to figure out that when you make a marketing deal With Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is the only one who makes any money.
Selling off their manufacturing will put a one-time addition to "earnings", and with any luck, all of the smart guys in management will have bailed out.
This one sort of relates to step 4: After you have totally trashed the company, lie on your financial statements while looking carefully for the Exit sign.
And in the mean time, the Wall St guys and the portfolio managers cashed their bonus checks and are now saying: "tsk, tsk - isn't it a shame".
Your response bothers me. It's what happens when people put ideology ahead of common sense and facts.
Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.
This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.
In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.
This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.
And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.
Actually, the original participants were debriefed. They were also asked detailed questions about what they did and how they felt about it.
That was probably the most chilling part of the original report. A large number of participants described themselves as feeling incredibly conflicted - they hated what they had been doing but felt compelled to continue.
And by the way, before the original experiments were performed, a "blue-ribbon" panel of psychologists was asked about the possible ethical effects on the ones giving the shocks. The panel believed that only about 15% of those tested would continue with the shocks and that 15% would be made up of degenerates who would not be bothered by their own actions. The 15% were present and they generally found a way to blame it on the victim. The other 65% who ramped the voltage up to the max at least felt bad about it.
Just as an ethical test: When Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was deported to Syria and tortured - how many of those here (who are so concerned about ethics) bothered to write their congressman. How many actually feel bad about our government's actions - assuming they even noticed - now that the Canadian government has apologized to Arar.
Part II of Milgram's conclusions described the situation where responsibility is divided up between many actors. One person makes up the list of Jews. Another rounds up the Jews and takes them to the train station. A third loaded them on the train...
Under those circumstances, Milgram concluded that there was almost no chance that any of the parties would have any chance of resisting authority.
In some ways, the Milgram experiments led to the most significant scientific result of the century. To the best of my knowledge, they have never been repeated, elaborated or followed up with additional studies.
Ethics = someone did not want you to know.
The most hopeful result of the original experiments was the response of a young German biology student. When her part of the experiment was explained to her, she looked the experimenter in the eye and said "This is not right! And I will not cooperate".
An interesting thread. Everyone has an opinion. So just to confuse things, I thought I's throw in a few facts.
... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." - Wikipedia
After the revolution, one of the more interesting historical events at the time was Shay's rebellion which occurred in 1786 - prior to the ratification of the constitution and well before the Bill of Rights.
"During an economic depression, with farm prices low and foreign markets closed, the state government was taxing the farmers (payable in hard money only) to pay wealthy eastern creditors who had lent depreciated paper (accepted at full face value) to the state government for bonds during the war." - Wikipedia
In plain English, the farmers were being royally screwed by the merchants and bankers. And by the lawyers who got a cut out of the proceed of seized property.
If you care about the details, Wikipedia has a lot more information.
The rebels were not that well armed and failed to capture the armory at Springfield. They were put down by a private mercenary force, paid for by the Boston bankers.
Just to demonstrate that politics and hypocrisy never change, one of our leading revolutionaries, Samuel Adams was quoted as saying:
"In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of republic ought to suffer death".
Needless to say, it did not go well for the rebels, but in the end only two were hanged for their participation in the rebellion.
"On Nov. 13, 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to New York senator William S. Smith saying, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.
If you are going to quote the founding fathers, it might be useful to do so in context. The above statements by Jefferson, so often quoted, were made in response to the failed rebellion.
Surprise! Voting is not an unalienable right. In Florida, any number of people were disenfranchised because a bogus database said that the had been guilty of a felony. In the case of some, the "date" of the felony was in the future. Many of them still can't vote.
If you want a list of your "unalienable" rights, you have to read the Supreme Court verdict in what are called the "Slaughterhouse Cases" from around 1873. The Supreme Court did not know how to deal with the concept, so it listed your "unalienable rights". You might be surprised at what they are.
A brief comment on the educational concept of "self esteem". Somewhere around the '90s, someone discovered that there were teachers (often in inner-city schools) who had zero respect for their students. They believed they were stupid or sub-standard and that is how they treated them.
Naturally the students reacted to this mostly non-verbal communication. Some just got pissed off and dropped out. Others simply stopped wanting to learn. And they didn't learn.
When the light dawned, the educational establishment made great efforts to communicate to every teacher how important self-esteem was for learning.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the part about teacher beliefs and behavior got edited out of the message. Apparently it was too painful for teachers and administrators to consider the idea that their beliefs and behavior might have an impact on the students.
So now we have the cult of "self esteem" and schools where the top fifty percent of the class gets a "My son is an honor student" sticker for the family car.
But the teachers still believe the students are stupid and the students are now insulted by a school that thinks they are too dumb to know when they are being conned.
All the teachers ever had to do was change their own behavior and attitudes.
So finally, after 1233 inane messages, the LA Times introduces some reality - and some new unreality - into the discussion.
We have a police officer with a past history of problems with violence (and who is himself a minority) carrying a taser because the university was concerned with his use of a nightstick on one person and his use of a gun in the shooting of a homeless man.
The facts may be subject to more endless debate, but the LA Times report says that he was suspended for 90 days for the incident where he used the nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on the street in front of a fraternity house.
You could make a reasonable hypothesis that tasers were purchased at UCLA because someone was concerned about the use of guns and nightsticks by their police.
"Tabatabainejad's attorney, Stephen Yagman, said his client was shocked five times with the Taser after he refused to show his ID because he thought he was being singled out for his Middle Eastern appearance". (Remember that the officer with the Taser was NOT the person who originally asked for ID and who then called the police.)
Considering the rampant paranoia throughout our society, there are any number of American citizens of middle-eastern decent who probably feel degraded and threatened. (Among other incidents, they threw a couple of Hindus off an airplane because other passengers were frightened by their appearance.)
It may not excuse acting like an asshole, but it does sort of explain it.
We should judge our leaders by their leadership ability, character, views, etc. Not by who their shagging.
I'm not an R or D either, but if we elect this guy, we will have shagged ourselves.
To reject IP as a legal fiction only leads us back to a terrifying fact that all property is, in essence, a lie. But it is a useful lie, which is why we Civilized People argue for it so strongly. If Disney has no right to protect its DVDs, what right do you have to your house? I'm sure the world's millions of homeless would like an answer.
What do you do when it stops being a useful lie.
Samuel Clemens was one of the authors who strongly advocated copyright protection. Pirates were publishing his books in Europe before the press run was completed in the States. He was being robbed and he knew it. Copyright was not only useful but necessary.
We passed a useful lie to protect individual authors. How useful is it when the system is set up so that the authors and musicians are screwed out of their copyrights before they can be published.
How useful is it when a music corporation can bribe a congressional aide to modify a bill that has already been passed -- in order to "clarify" it in favor of the industry
Maybe we need a different lie. Maybe we need a lie that protects the creators against the pirates and the corporations.
If my previous ISP had simply gone out of business that would be a shame.
And yes -- if mindsprung bought my account, they also bought the obligation to deliver the service.
The actual issue is small words is: "What kind of idiot, sets you up a new e-mail account (and sends you a bill to that account) without ever informing you that the account exists."
No advance notice by either e-mail or snail mail.
Naturally a change in my e-mail address is a major pita, but why fight what can't be changed?
Customer service is actually fairly competent, we presumably get the billing straightened out, and I hook up to the new e-mail account.
And I have mail ...
So we go thru this e-mail exchange .
I'm not nice, I'm not polite and I'm definitely not too happy with Mindsprung.
Hitler's Holocaust has thought us that terrible lesson. Only morally and socially acceptable speech should be fully allowed to be spoken freely, hateful and harmful speech should be restricted fully.
If the laws you talk about were in place in Hitler's time (for all I know they were), it would then have been 'socially unacceptable' to denounce the Nazis for genocide.
The Nazis, of course, did not really need a law to shoot anyone who disagreed with them.
I'll leave the details on e-gold to your search engine.
The idea that interests me is the possibility of micropayments as low as 5 cents (possibly smaller) with a lot more convenience than PayPal and some of the other electronic payment systems. The transaction cost is 1/2 of a percent, with a maximum transaction fee of fifty cents no matter how large the transaction.
This could allow payment for content without the need for a twenty or thirty dollar subscription when you only want to read one article or only want one-time access to the site.
I'm curious as to whether anyone else has considered this specific payment mechanism. At first glance, it seems that it allows a number of new business models that actually work.
Ok, maybe that one is a stretch, but when you are under suspicion of thinking without a permit, do you really want the investigator to have a list of every movie you have ever watched ??
For want of anything else to do, I sent the link to the Putnam Pit
The editor, Geoff Davidian has been waging a one man war against local government corruption in his home town in Putnam County, Tennessee.
His style is outrageous enough that from time to time he has gotten some major publicity - and he has an international subscription list.
He is also sponsoring a project involving student journalists and investigative reporting. I'd be more definite, but it has been a while since I read that article.
With a small amount of encouragement, he might take an interest in this issue.
From the parts that I actualy paid attention to, the defense claimed that the police lied and planted evidence. The jury believed this.
Now that half the LA Police department is under investigation for lying, planting evidence and killing people, the defense doesn't seem all that improbable.
All of the people who had made up their minds about his guilt are still convinced, and the police scandal doesn't seem to have registered.
To drag this nonsense out just a little further, I stopped believing reports about police investigations about ten years ago when Boston had the famous "silver gun killer" case.
This is a rough description but it's pretty close. A man and his wife had just gotten into their car. The man was shot in the shoulder and his wife was killed. He claimed that a black man with a silver gun did the shooting.
Lo and behold, the Boston police arrested a black man and came up with seventeen witnesses that said that he owned a silver gun and used to wave it around in restaurants.
After the autopsy determined that there was no way that the shot that killed the woman could have come from outside of the car, the seventeen or so witnesses explained that they had been threatened with loss of welfare checks, criminal prosecution, and offered various deals in order to get their testimony.
If the police had been a little smarter, they probably would have claimed that the defendent was lying underneath the car and fired upward through the floorboard.
I don't think OJ was innocent. I think I do not know.