Parent post sed: "Could you cite me the relevant section of the law on that?"
Sure can it's Dodge v.s. Ford a 1916 Supreme Court decision:
"Dodge v. Ford Motor Company From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668. (Mich. 1919), was a famous case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford owed a duty to the shareholders of the Ford Motor Company to operate his business for profitable purposes as opposed to charitable purposes.
Facts
In 1916, the Ford Motor Company earned surpluses in excess of $100,000,000.00. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to stop declaring dividends for investors, and instead cut prices below the price for which they could actually sell cars, while at the same time increasing the number of persons employed by his company. Ford said that he wanted to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars. He stated:
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business."
Minority shareholders objected, demanding that Ford continue to charge higher prices in order to pay them larger dividends.
Issue
The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.
Opinion of the Court
The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto.
Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company's assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19 million."
Ever since this TERRIBLE decision (with perhaps good original intent) combined with limited liability, and ruling that the corporation has the same 14th amendment rights as a person in the 19th century it's utterly foolish to think a corporation can even legally "do no evil."
It's interesting how geeks have turned on Google
on
Google's Insular Nature
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Google was every geeks darling and there was very much a see no evil attitude until Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results. That was fortunately a wake up call and now I think people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors. The fly in the ointment though is now since Google is perceived to be hypocritical it's no longer a good investment. The bottom line is that for a lot of people who consider themselves to be rationalists geeks are effected by fundamentally irrational trends i.e. feelings towards a company as much as anyone else. Google good, google bad, depends on which week we are on. Would this article have been written before Google sold out to the Chinese? Probably not since the geeks hadn't turned on Google yet even though they were doing the EXACT things this article talks about before the Chinese debacle.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
Talk about not getting the point. The point is, is that overly landscaped mirror glass office park complexes that are under constant security monitoring are very dehumanizing in a Blade Runner future sort of way, it doesn't matter if the company involved is making hard drives or coding the Solaris kernel or whatever, the point is, is that the physical and social environment is degrading to our psyche, or soul if you want to be more poetic. My question was whether this is intrinsic to the process of making information technology or an artifact of American disposable culture. My guess and hope is it's the latter.
And no I'm not from S.V. so I don't know the whole area but I did live in San Francisco 15 years ago and I used to drive by San Jose on the freeway and even then the description in the article I quoted seemed pretty accurate.
I like my ibook as well as the next guy but the specific culture and landscape of Silicon Valley is putrid and dehumanizing. I think the real question is can high tech be produced in a more humane way. OSS seems to answer that to some extent in software, hardware may be a different question altogether. This passage from the essay Life on Margins should give all techno utopians pause to think:
"Taking a wrong turn off the walled highway, from which, through extensive work over the last several years, all landmarks have thoughtfully been concealed, I discovered the sanitized strip of North First Street in sprawling, silicon-powered San Jose. I knew about Silicon Valley, of course. Who doesn't? But I'd never been at its epicenter, surrounded by the built world it makes and is, in turn, made by. Along North First Street, mile after mile of modern office parks squat on old orchard land, the lovely, irrelevant mountains far away on either side. No humans can be seen behind the endless ranks of tinted windows or outside in the dead lakes of their windswept parking lots. Meaningless logos: UNISYS, INFORMIX, 3COM--glow like neon eyes from empty concrete faces.
All is new, clean, quiet, freshly painted, expensively landscaped. But the rows of young trees, stuck in the manicured earth as ornament, look more like famished prisoners lined up to be shot. They, and the glass box buildings, seem as untouched by life and movement as an architect's scale model. Even the brilliant sunshine can't make it look real. A single refrain is repeated in the parking lot signs: This Area Is Monitored by Video Surveillance at All Times.
In its regimentation, if not its ostentation, North First Street ironically calls to mind the old Socialist bloc, except if you recall that the ugly architecture there was mostly built to house people. (It's clear no people actually live anywhere near these buildings, they must live miles away, in suburban tracts.) Even the eternal spying generated by that now fallen system was a perverse form of employment, performed by actual human beings instead of neutral, unresistant machines.
But Silicon Valley, in spite of the reversals of recent years, is a zone of expansion, not collapse. New ground is being cleared every day. There is money here, and more is pouring in, like cement into a mold, to shape a future.
At the northern end of this long, silent no-place, atop lead-gray bunkers, the enormous white radar disks of Lockheed rise from behind a straggling line of brush, blank dish-faces turned toward the bright, generous California sky, looking for death."
German Republic of America. The constitution had a pretty good run at 220 years. Now we value "safety" more than liberty like all good collectivist societies do. You'll enjoy your iris scans, national ids, constant monitoring of every financial transaction you undertake, after all if you aren't doing anything wrong what do you have to fear? It's for the children and against the terrorists and the MSM supports it, what more do need? Only anti-social subversive dissidents "think for themselves" that's sooooo 20th century and definitely a sign of mental illness.
Who won the cold war again? I keep forgetting... We've always been at war with East Asia, right?
Bzzzt here's on article on Paul Thorrott's Windows SuperSite talking about the begining of Longhorn (now vista development) from 2002 talking about the previous years Longhorn development in 2001. Vista is a long bake turkey, try ahhmm 5 years.
Answer hate speech with more speech taking down the racists arguments with rational discourse, how hard is that? Why does everyone always jump on censorship as the answer?
Be merciful http://treefunk.net/forum/ Apache/PHP Works great for the 20-30 visitors a day I get..000001% of slashdotters will take it and my dsl line down faster than I can say UNCLE, now get off me already.:)
Perhaps this huh, huh, huh, it's cool to ream people over attitude is why some of us are less sanguine on the Libertarian "free market" than others. And no the solution isn't the state it's more education, more co-ops/free software, and more routing around people who rejoice in being pricks and screwing people over. And to the person who laughed because they smartly avoid "rent to own" what do you think of high interest credit card payments, high interest car loans, and other accouterments of a middle/upper middle class lifestyles that I'm guessing you are paying? Remember the next person up the food chain is laughing just as hard at you for those decisions as you are laughing at people in the ghetto using "rent to own." Who is laughing now?
Yes I agree it's very unlikely it will happen, I'm saying that's what ought to happen. And of course we should stop threatening Venezuela. Unfortunately what I see actually happening is the U.S. spending more useless billions on trying to prevent terrorism, more ratcheting down of our civil liberties, president Hilary Clinton in 08 who will be billed as a "moderate" but who will pursue the EXACT same policies as the neo-cons including war with Iran and Syria, and Americans driving SUVs until the bitter end, right up to peak oil which may be any day now. In short I'm not too optimistic about the future.
By the way you asked: "By the way,...exactly which freedoms that our Constitution guarantees do you think are being threatened?"
Specifically the 4th amendment of the bill of rights to the constitution which states:
" The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Ubiquitous spying is an absolute violation of our ability "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." Does that answer your question specifically and clearly about which freedoms are being violated by the war on terror in general and by listening in our phone calls without a warrant or any supervision what so ever, data mining our calling records without any supervision, and collecting information on our internet usage? What part of "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Bullshit there is no way to entirely secure the U.S. at roughly 1000 miles by 2500 miles the total land area of the U.S. is 2,500,000 square miles. To completely secure the U.S. you would need a homeland security officer for every square mile, i.e. 2 million 5 hundred thousand, plus we'd have to search every single car, and every single house on a daily basis. If this isn't done then someone can drive a truck into the middle of city and blow it up, that's reality. Rather than spending billions on something we can't prevent and would turn us into a literal police state if we tried, far better to withdraw from the middle east entirely and work on energy independence so we aren't dependent on Muslim nations at all for anything. Withdraw from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, stop buying middle easter oil, and stop supporting Israel and ding the terrorism problem is 100% solved, how hard is that? As a bonus using less oil extends the time until peak oil and is better for the environment. Or we can keep driving SUVs, spend billions on useless terrorism prevention measures, keep supporting the aggressor state of Israel, and wind up with WWIII with Iran, Syria, etc, your choice.
And to the other poster that's 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. of course:
"Heart Attack and Angina Statistics
2003 statistics for the United States show that coronary heart disease (CHD) is the single leading cause of death in America. CHD causes heart attack and angina.
* Mortality -- 479,305 deaths in the United States in 2003 (one of every 5 deaths) (preliminary).
* Incidence -- 1,200,000 new and recurrent coronary attacks per year. (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Atherosclerotic Risk in Communities [ARIC] Study, 1987-2000.) About 40 percent of people who experience a coronary attack in a given year die from it.
* Prevalence -- 13,200,000 victims of angina (chest pain due to coronary heart disease), heart attack and other forms of coronary heart disease are still living (7,200,000 males and 6,000,000 females).
* From 1993 to 2003 the death rate from coronary heart disease declined 26.5 percent, but the actual number of deaths declined only 9.9 percent.
* Estimates are that 6,500,000 people in the United States suffer from angina.
* An estimated 400,000 new cases of stable angina occur each year. (Framingham Heart Study, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)
* The estimated age-adjusted prevalence of angina in women age 20 and older was 3.5 percent for non-Hispanic white women, 4.7 percent for non-Hispanic black women and 2.2 percent for Mexican-American women. Rates for men in these three groups were 4.5, 3.1 and 2.4 percent, respectively.*
* Among American adults age 20 and older, the estimated age-adjusted prevalence of coronary heart disease for non-Hispanic whites is 8.9 percent for men and 5.4 percent for women; for non-Hispanic blacks, 7.4 percent for men and 7.5 percent for women; and for Mexican-Americans, 5.6 percent for men and 4.3 percent for women.*
*Based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 1999-2002), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Center for Health Statistics."
That means that 479,305/3,200 = 149.78 TIMES as many people die of heart attacks per year compared to terrorism and that is compounded year after year, in ten years you are literally a thousand times less likely to die of terrorism than a heart attack. That means that in less than 3 days, every 3 days we have a 911 of heart attacks, think about it. Than means the rational allocation of resources to actually prevent deaths in the U.S. is educating people about the da
...stop eating fat burgers and leave MY freedom alone. 1 in 5 Americans dies of heart attacks every year. OTH as tragic as the deaths were on 911 for the families involved, compared to heart attacks, strokes, or auto accidents they are a drop in the bucket. If people would worry about the real killers and not curtail freedoms based on hype from demagogues the country would be in MUCH better shape,
I actually agree with you anonymous, I'm probably one of only a dozen people on the "left" in the U.S. who believes in armed self defense. Why the "left" (pseudo yuppie left?) embraced gun control is beyond me considering that the IWW fighting back with gasp guns against the Pinkerton cops and National Guard is one of the ways we won a 40 hour work week in the U.S.
Really the entire political debate is fucked in the U.S. the right/Libertarians value material things above ALL else including human rights in the third world, a living wage here, and any kind of environmental sustainability whatsoever and the "left" believes in a big smothering state with gun control, porn control, violent video game control, big brother phone taps, national i.d. and other such controlling badness. The Republicans the same minus the gun control, but add in control over peoples sexuality, religious beliefs or lack there of, and right to decide whether or not to have an abortion. That's why my shtick is distrust ALL big organizations private OR state, and a pox on BOTH unthinking right wingers AND left wingers, and especially a pox on weak kneed moderates who often embrace the worse controlling and war mongering aspects of both Dems and Repigs.
And perhaps the Greens would do a better job but not only are they shut out by the MSM but they tend to be flaky fuckups, so stop dreaming about reform within the system and start doing it yourself outside the system with everything from unions to co-ops, to free software, to growing gardens, tell the big organizations public and private to kiss off every way you possible can.
Mod parent up. The more materialistic a society is, the more "security" forces i.e. cops, i.e. repressive government it needs to protect individuals holdings of property, plus it needs complex contract law which equals bureaucracy and thick law books, etc. Libertarians need to make a CHOICE do you like liberty or material well being the best? If you like material well being be honest and call yourselves propertyarians and quite flim flaming people about liberty, it's a lie and it only makes you look bad when people figure out the truth. The fact that you believe the police who you normally hold to be bad repressive thugs suddenly become good when protecting your property shows your double standard. The same that you see thick books of contract law as not being evil bureaucracy which you would call ANY other thick law book.
And if a corporation owns you for 2/3rds of your waking hours, spies on your typing, photographs you in the bathroom, and fires you at will because they can hire someone in India to do your job for 10/hr what sort of freedom is that? The freedom to be spied on and then left living in your car due to a shift in the global market? I'll pass on that "freedom," thanks...
And no I don't think the state is the answer either, I think unions and co-ops are the answer, screw BOTH the centralized state and the centralized corporations. The best way to own yourself is to not directly contract your life away to the whim of corporate CEOs as a disempowered individual in contract negotiations, or to be a corporation owner yourself who presumes to own others lives during their work day. Neither slave, nor slave owner, that is true freedom and not just some Anne Randian abstraction that Libertarians use to rationalize their greedy unsustainable lifestyles as cheap labor conservatives who want to build their mini mansions in the middle of some pristine forest.
And yes I will feel extreme schadenfreude when oil scarcity dries up the gas for your SUVs, makes the fat burgers disappear, and leaves you in a cold, dark, unheated mini mansion with no army of servants to tend to your every whim.
Yep -1 offtopic troll and -1 for the offtopic parent too I've got karma to burn baby, bring it on...
Seriously though 512 megs is probably not enough. 640 megs barely cuts it on my 3 year G3 ibook running Panther and mainly used for web surfing, e-mail and light photo editing. Go for a gig minimum with Tiger and 2 gig if you are doing anything heavy duty with media like sound editing, video editing or serious photoshop.
The problem with your theory is I WOULD buy a Dell with OS X (preferably tri-boot with Windows and Linux), I wouldn't buy a Mac that just booted Windows. And yes Mac "fan boi" with a PPC iBook, G5 Tower, and ipod nano. And yes for the record I am disappointed Apple has closed the source of the kernel. I would like to see Apple preserve our freedom as much as possible while preserving it's just works gui, and ability to detect peripherals without having to load modules or tweak config files like Linux or the open BSDs.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll see if can find that book thanks for the tip.
I didn't write it dumbass didn't you see the URL at the end?
Parent post sed: "Could you cite me the relevant section of the law on that?"
C ompany
r eclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/personhood_timeline .pdf+corporation+14th+amendment+rights&hl=en&gl=us &ct=clnk&cd=3&client=firefox-a
Sure can it's Dodge v.s. Ford a 1916 Supreme Court decision:
"Dodge v. Ford Motor Company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668. (Mich. 1919), was a famous case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford owed a duty to the shareholders of the Ford Motor Company to operate his business for profitable purposes as opposed to charitable purposes.
Facts
In 1916, the Ford Motor Company earned surpluses in excess of $100,000,000.00. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to stop declaring dividends for investors, and instead cut prices below the price for which they could actually sell cars, while at the same time increasing the number of persons employed by his company. Ford said that he wanted to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars. He stated:
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business."
Minority shareholders objected, demanding that Ford continue to charge higher prices in order to pay them larger dividends.
Issue
The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.
Opinion of the Court
The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto.
Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company's assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19 million."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_
Ever since this TERRIBLE decision (with perhaps good original intent) combined with limited liability, and ruling that the corporation has the same 14th amendment rights as a person in the 19th century it's utterly foolish to think a corporation can even legally "do no evil."
See also" http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:OUxdJmMReQ8J:
For more on corporate personhood.
Google was every geeks darling and there was very much a see no evil attitude until Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results. That was fortunately a wake up call and now I think people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a
a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors. The fly in the ointment though is now since Google is perceived to be hypocritical it's no longer a good investment. The bottom line is that for a lot of people who consider themselves to be rationalists geeks are effected by fundamentally irrational trends i.e. feelings towards a company as much as anyone else. Google good, google bad, depends on which week we are on. Would this article have been written before Google sold out to the Chinese? Probably not since the geeks hadn't turned on Google yet even though they were doing the EXACT things this article talks about before the Chinese debacle.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
Talk about not getting the point. The point is, is that overly landscaped mirror glass office park complexes that are under constant security monitoring are very dehumanizing in a Blade Runner future sort of way, it doesn't matter if the company involved is making hard drives or coding the Solaris kernel or whatever, the point is, is that the physical and social environment is degrading to our psyche, or soul if you want to be more poetic. My question was whether this is intrinsic to the process of making information technology or an artifact of American disposable culture. My guess and hope is it's the latter.
And no I'm not from S.V. so I don't know the whole area but I did live in San Francisco 15 years ago and I used to drive by San Jose on the freeway and even then the description in the article I quoted seemed pretty accurate.
I like my ibook as well as the next guy but the specific culture and landscape of Silicon Valley is putrid and dehumanizing. I think the real question is can high tech be produced in a more humane way. OSS seems to answer that to some extent in software, hardware may be a different question altogether. This passage from the essay Life on Margins should give all techno utopians pause to think:
m argins.html
"Taking a wrong turn off the walled highway, from which, through extensive work over the last several years, all landmarks have thoughtfully been concealed, I discovered the sanitized strip of North First Street in sprawling, silicon-powered San Jose. I knew about Silicon Valley, of course. Who doesn't? But I'd never been at its epicenter, surrounded by the built world it makes and is, in turn, made by. Along North First Street, mile after mile of modern office parks squat on old orchard land, the lovely, irrelevant mountains far away on either side. No humans can be seen behind the endless ranks of tinted windows or outside in the dead lakes of their windswept parking lots. Meaningless logos: UNISYS, INFORMIX, 3COM--glow like neon eyes from empty concrete faces.
All is new, clean, quiet, freshly painted, expensively landscaped. But the rows of young trees, stuck in the manicured earth as ornament, look more like famished prisoners lined up to be shot. They, and the glass box buildings, seem as untouched by life and movement as an architect's scale model. Even the brilliant sunshine can't make it look real. A single refrain is repeated in the parking lot signs: This Area Is Monitored by Video Surveillance at All Times.
In its regimentation, if not its ostentation, North First Street ironically calls to mind the old Socialist bloc, except if you recall that the ugly architecture there was mostly built to house people. (It's clear no people actually live anywhere near these buildings, they must live miles away, in suburban tracts.) Even the eternal spying generated by that now fallen system was a perverse form of employment, performed by actual human beings instead of neutral, unresistant machines.
But Silicon Valley, in spite of the reversals of recent years, is a zone of expansion, not collapse. New ground is being cleared every day. There is money here, and more is pouring in, like cement into a mold, to shape a future.
At the northern end of this long, silent no-place, atop lead-gray bunkers, the enormous white radar disks of Lockheed rise from behind a straggling line of brush, blank dish-faces turned toward the bright, generous California sky, looking for death."
http://www.whatifjournal.org/pages/Online/rodgers
German Republic of America. The constitution had a pretty good run at 220 years. Now we value "safety" more than liberty like all good collectivist societies do. You'll enjoy your iris scans, national ids, constant monitoring of every financial transaction you undertake, after all if you aren't doing anything wrong what do you have to fear? It's for the children and against the terrorists and the MSM supports it, what more do need? Only anti-social subversive dissidents "think for themselves" that's sooooo 20th century and definitely a sign of mental illness.
Who won the cold war again? I keep forgetting... We've always been at war with East Asia, right?
Bzzzt here's on article on Paul Thorrott's Windows SuperSite talking about the begining of Longhorn (now vista development) from 2002 talking about the previous years Longhorn development in 2001. Vista is a long bake turkey, try ahhmm 5 years.
v iew.asp
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_pre
Answer hate speech with more speech taking down the racists arguments with rational discourse, how hard is that? Why does everyone always jump on censorship as the answer?
And Vista has been in development for what FIVE years? Hmmmmm...
Be merciful http://treefunk.net/forum/ Apache/PHP Works great for the 20-30 visitors a day I get. .000001% of slashdotters will take it and my dsl line down faster than I can say UNCLE, now get off me already. :)
Perhaps this huh, huh, huh, it's cool to ream people over attitude is why some of us are less sanguine on the Libertarian "free market" than others. And no the solution isn't the state it's more education, more co-ops/free software, and more routing around people who rejoice in being pricks and screwing people over. And to the person who laughed because they smartly avoid "rent to own" what do you think of high interest credit card payments, high interest car loans, and other accouterments of a middle/upper middle class lifestyles that I'm guessing you are paying? Remember the next person up the food chain is laughing just as hard at you for those decisions as you are laughing at people in the ghetto using "rent to own." Who is laughing now?
Yes I agree it's very unlikely it will happen, I'm saying that's what ought to happen. And of course we should stop threatening Venezuela. Unfortunately what I see actually happening is the U.S. spending more useless billions on trying to prevent terrorism, more ratcheting down of our civil liberties, president Hilary Clinton in 08 who will be billed as a "moderate" but who will pursue the EXACT same policies as the neo-cons including war with Iran and Syria, and Americans driving SUVs until the bitter end, right up to peak oil which may be any day now. In short I'm not too optimistic about the future.
By the way you asked: "By the way, ...exactly which freedoms that our Constitution guarantees do you think are being threatened?"
m endment04/
Specifically the 4th amendment of the bill of rights to the constitution which states:
" The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a
Ubiquitous spying is an absolute violation of our ability "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." Does that answer your question specifically and clearly about which freedoms are being violated by the war on terror in general and by listening in our phone calls without a warrant or any supervision what so ever, data mining our calling records without any supervision, and collecting information on our internet usage? What part of "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Bullshit there is no way to entirely secure the U.S. at roughly 1000 miles by 2500 miles the total land area of the U.S. is 2,500,000 square miles. To completely secure the U.S. you would need a homeland security officer for every square mile, i.e. 2 million 5 hundred thousand, plus we'd have to search every single car, and every single house on a daily basis. If this isn't done then someone can drive a truck into the middle of city and blow it up, that's reality. Rather than spending billions on something we can't prevent and would turn us into a literal police state if we tried, far better to withdraw from the middle east entirely and work on energy independence so we aren't dependent on Muslim nations at all for anything. Withdraw from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, stop buying middle easter oil, and stop supporting Israel and ding the terrorism problem is 100% solved, how hard is that? As a bonus using less oil extends the time until peak oil and is better for the environment. Or we can keep driving SUVs, spend billions on useless terrorism prevention measures, keep supporting the aggressor state of Israel, and wind up with WWIII with Iran, Syria, etc, your choice.
And to the other poster that's 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. of course:
"Heart Attack and Angina Statistics
2003 statistics for the United States show that coronary heart disease (CHD) is the single leading cause of death in America. CHD causes heart attack and angina.
* Mortality -- 479,305 deaths in the United States in 2003 (one of every 5 deaths) (preliminary).
* Incidence -- 1,200,000 new and recurrent coronary attacks per year. (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Atherosclerotic Risk in Communities [ARIC] Study, 1987-2000.) About 40 percent of people who experience a coronary attack in a given year die from it.
* Prevalence -- 13,200,000 victims of angina (chest pain due to coronary heart disease), heart attack and other forms of coronary heart disease are still living (7,200,000 males and 6,000,000 females).
* From 1993 to 2003 the death rate from coronary heart disease declined 26.5 percent, but the actual number of deaths declined only 9.9 percent.
* Estimates are that 6,500,000 people in the United States suffer from angina.
* An estimated 400,000 new cases of stable angina occur each year. (Framingham Heart Study, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)
* The estimated age-adjusted prevalence of angina in women age 20 and older was 3.5 percent for non-Hispanic white women, 4.7 percent for non-Hispanic black women and 2.2 percent for Mexican-American women. Rates for men in these three groups were 4.5, 3.1 and 2.4 percent, respectively.*
* Among American adults age 20 and older, the estimated age-adjusted prevalence of coronary heart disease for non-Hispanic whites is 8.9 percent for men and 5.4 percent for women; for non-Hispanic blacks, 7.4 percent for men and 7.5 percent for women; and for Mexican-Americans, 5.6 percent for men and 4.3 percent for women.*
*Based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 1999-2002), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Center for Health Statistics."
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?ident ifier=4591
That means that 479,305/3,200 = 149.78 TIMES as many people die of heart attacks per year compared to terrorism and that is compounded year after year, in ten years you are literally a thousand times less likely to die of terrorism than a heart attack. That means that in less than 3 days, every 3 days we have a 911 of heart attacks, think about it. Than means the rational allocation of resources to actually prevent deaths in the U.S. is educating people about the da
...stop eating fat burgers and leave MY freedom alone. 1 in 5 Americans dies of heart attacks every year. OTH as tragic as the deaths were on 911 for the families involved, compared to heart attacks, strokes, or auto accidents they are a drop in the bucket. If people would worry about the real killers and not curtail freedoms based on hype from demagogues the country would be in MUCH better shape,
M dollar win blows. Any other questions you'd like answered?
I actually agree with you anonymous, I'm probably one of only a dozen people on the "left" in the U.S. who believes in armed self defense. Why the "left" (pseudo yuppie left?) embraced gun control is beyond me considering that the IWW fighting back with gasp guns against the Pinkerton cops and National Guard is one of the ways we won a 40 hour work week in the U.S.
Really the entire political debate is fucked in the U.S. the right/Libertarians value material things above ALL else including human rights in the third world, a living wage here, and any kind of environmental sustainability whatsoever and the "left" believes in a big smothering state with gun control, porn control, violent video game control, big brother phone taps, national i.d. and other such controlling badness. The Republicans the same minus the gun control, but add in control over peoples sexuality, religious beliefs or lack there of, and right to decide whether or not to have an abortion. That's why my shtick is distrust ALL big organizations private OR state, and a pox on BOTH unthinking right wingers AND left wingers, and especially a pox on weak kneed moderates who often embrace the worse controlling and war mongering aspects of both Dems and Repigs.
And perhaps the Greens would do a better job but not only are they shut out by the MSM but they tend to be flaky fuckups, so stop dreaming about reform within the system and start doing it yourself outside the system with everything from unions to co-ops, to free software, to growing gardens, tell the big organizations public and private to kiss off every way you possible can.
Mod parent up. The more materialistic a society is, the more "security" forces i.e. cops, i.e. repressive government it needs to protect individuals holdings of property, plus it needs complex contract law which equals bureaucracy and thick law books, etc. Libertarians need to make a CHOICE do you like liberty or material well being the best? If you like material well being be honest and call yourselves propertyarians and quite flim flaming people about liberty, it's a lie and it only makes you look bad when people figure out the truth. The fact that you believe the police who you normally hold to be bad repressive thugs suddenly become good when protecting your property shows your double standard. The same that you see thick books of contract law as not being evil bureaucracy which you would call ANY other thick law book.
That's what boot camp is for sucka... Oops did I just crush your feeble Winodze only box's ego? So sorry...
And if a corporation owns you for 2/3rds of your waking hours, spies on your typing, photographs you in the bathroom, and fires you at will because they can hire someone in India to do your job for 10/hr what sort of freedom is that? The freedom to be spied on and then left living in your car due to a shift in the global market? I'll pass on that "freedom," thanks...
And no I don't think the state is the answer either, I think unions and co-ops are the answer, screw BOTH the centralized state and the centralized corporations. The best way to own yourself is to not directly contract your life away to the whim of corporate CEOs as a disempowered individual in contract negotiations, or to be a corporation owner yourself who presumes to own others lives during their work day. Neither slave, nor slave owner, that is true freedom and not just some Anne Randian abstraction that Libertarians use to rationalize their greedy unsustainable lifestyles as cheap labor conservatives who want to build their mini mansions in the middle of some pristine forest.
And yes I will feel extreme schadenfreude when oil scarcity dries up the gas for your SUVs, makes the fat burgers disappear, and leaves you in a cold, dark, unheated mini mansion with no army of servants to tend to your every whim.
Yep -1 offtopic troll and -1 for the offtopic parent too I've got karma to burn baby, bring it on...
Mod parent up, a world of p.c. less gadgets as passive media recievers equals the current nightmare of tee vee as a passive medium.
You'll never need more than 512 K
--Bill Gates
Seriously though 512 megs is probably not enough. 640 megs barely cuts it on my 3 year G3 ibook running Panther and mainly used for web surfing, e-mail and light photo editing. Go for a gig minimum with Tiger and 2 gig if you are doing anything heavy duty with media like sound editing, video editing or serious photoshop.
The problem with your theory is I WOULD buy a Dell with OS X (preferably tri-boot with Windows and Linux), I wouldn't buy a Mac that just booted Windows. And yes Mac "fan boi" with a PPC iBook, G5 Tower, and ipod nano. And yes for the record I am disappointed Apple has closed the source of the kernel. I would like to see Apple preserve our freedom as much as possible while preserving it's just works gui, and ability to detect peripherals without having to load modules or tweak config files like Linux or the open BSDs.
PDA with wireless and a home server and you are done. I'd prefer a palm tx and and a dual core Mac as the home server, but that's just me.