The problem with cities polluting themselves is that corporations could move to the next city once they had done damage to the first, or even leave the country. Regardless, there are remedies like that (boycott the corporation).
Yes, you can sue a corporation that pollutes. Of course, you're replacing laws with lawsuits. Not saying this is worse - might be better. My crystal ball is a bit cloudy today. Unfortunately, when your kids come down with cancer, a lawsuit won't replace your child. And a lawsuit might not be enough of a stick to keep corporations in line.
Using public interest groups to certify corporate policy - that's interesting. So long as the public interest group is knowledgable enough, and uncorruptable. I remember seeing a story on 60 Minutes where corporations would undermine the process of getting the public to provide input on new laws. They would hire some slimy firm to call up little old ladies, and ask a carefully phrased question so that the answer they gave was what the corporation wanted ("Yes, I agree, medicare is bad"). The PR firm would then ask if they could write the letter to the congressman on behalf of the little old lady, and if she said yes, they would write it on kitty-cat notepaper, and supply her address and name as the return address.
Anyway, I'm Canadian, and that means "Peace, order and good government", not "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". I can see some workable ideas in what you are saying, but it could be a nightmare if the process gets hijacked. Remember, we don't have all those guns under our beds.
The update to the story implies that as video games get more violent, societal violence decreases.
I'm not saying that's not true, but that's a damned big assumption. Most sociologists say that violence in North America and Europe is on the decline due to demographics - a larger percentage of the population is older, due to the post war baby boom. Older people do not commit violet crime.
As to violent video games, I have no real opinion on the matter.
Make the Punishment Suit the Crime
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 1
If you want Monsanto to clean up the mess, make all the executives in the company move with their families to the area. After all, PCBs are only "slightly tumorigenic".
You'd see a much more enthusiastic cleanup.
BTW, Monsanto does not have a great record. The company name is the maiden name of the wife of the founder. They got lucky, and got the contract to supply chemicals to a small company called Coca Cola. They made Agent Orange for the Vientam war, and were responsible for one of the first large industrial accidents in the US of A (a chemical-laden ship of theirs blew up in a harbour somewhere in the southern US, killing a bunch of people).
Glad to see that they haven't changed their tune. Next, they will explode a nuclear weapon over a heavily populated area.
Re:One libertarian's perspective
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Let the city or county government enact rules as to what corporations or individuals can do now. If a corporation wants to, they can always move to a city that lets them do what they want to do..."
There's a small problem with that. The communities become businesses, competing with one another for business. "Sure, you can polute here so long as you create jobs".
Globalization has caused the same problem. When big American companies were pushing Free Trade, they talked about how it would create more jobs, mean more money, etc. And as soon is it got passed, they shut down plants in North America and moved them to Mexico where labour and environmental laws were lax.
In addition, PCBs in Alabama means PCBs in the Gulf of Mexico, which means PCBs in the seafood bought in New York or Seattle.
This is a global problem, not a local problem. Certain regulations should be world-wide. Competition should not be based on lax environmental laws and poor labour laws.
Yah, I agree, a bunch of regulations hasn't solved the problem either. Perhaps the law should change so that the punishment suits the crime. Make every Monsanto executive and their family move there and live in that poisoned environment, and then see how fast it gets cleaned up.
One of My Favorites
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What made the novel truely disturbing was the alienation that the soldiers experienced upon returning home.
Because they travelled at the speed of light, a tour that lasted a year could mean that hundreds of years had passed back on Earth. The accepted norms and values of society had changed remarkably, and the soldiers had to try to adapt.
I suppose this alienation parallels the experience of Vietnam veterans, as Haldeman openly mentions that the book is really about Vietnam.
The Forever Peace, which has nothing to do with the Forever War, but is none-the-less a great book.
Where does Helix ("Give me an R... R... Give me an O... O...."), that Canadian band at the zenith of bad hair and guitar riffs, stand on this important issue?
An mp3-player with a USB slot, a digital camera with a USB slot, a Palm with a USB slot.
I mean, my 64 meg in my digital camera's compact flash cards are useless in my mp3 player (64 meg internal, and SmartMedia external). While using my camera, the 64 meg in my mp3 player is useless.
Most storage is used for temporary data. Would be nice to share that storage.
I don't expect that Palm, Nikkon, HP, Diamond, etc will radically change their products interfaces as a result of this one product, but it's nice to dream.
I'm sorry, my friend, but that's not the case at all.
For example, "Dr. Davis has been receiving a large number of emails from parents, who have had their children's hair analyzed for toxic chemicals. The preliminary results show that extraordinarily high levels of antimony and arsenic are being found in children with learning and behavioral disorders within the spectrum of autism." - from Crib Life.
Also, from Preventing Harm, states that, "Animal and human studies demonstrate that a variety of chemicals commonly encountered in industry and the home can contribute to developmental, learning, and behavioral disabilities" and that "[c]ertain genes may be susceptible to or cause individuals to be more susceptible to environmental "triggers." Particular vulnerability to a chemical exposure may be the result of a single or multiple interacting genes."
And finally, the jury is still out on the link between vaccination (especially the MMR - mumps/measles/rubella vacine) and autism. There are numerous doctors who believe their is a link, and just as many who say there is not.
So do you really believe that environment plays no role in autism?
Wow. Glad you cleared that up. Was beginning to worry. We humans can't predict the weather accurately 3 days in advance, but you know the effects of complex chemicals on humans from the time they are conceived until autism is detected?
"There simply hasn't been enough testing and research into the health hazards posed by low-level exposure to combinations of toxic chemicals. If anything, the experience of the semiconductor industry should be sobering -- the complexity of the chemical cocktails at use in modern high-tech industrial manufacturing is mind-boggling, and it is always getting more so. There is little chance, warn these experts, of ever catching up with the public health challenges inherent in new advances in technology, especially when the rate of change continues to accelerate." - Another quote from the.
I've read that the levels of pollution in SV are pretty mind-boggling. While software development is "pollution free" (except for the crap we developers eat that mascarades as food), other industry there has not been so kind to the soil and water.
From the New Almaden Mine in the Santa Cruz mountains, to the "largest plumes of poisoned groundwater in the United States, over 3 miles long and 180 feet deep, contaminated with xylene, toluene and other volatile organic compounds, including the chlorinated solvent trichloroethane (TCA)" that IBM left behind when manufacturing disk drives, there are some serious problems.
O's R would suggest that we look at this first, rather than at the genetics of the parents. Birds of a feather have flocked together for centuries, with no apparent ill effects.
and where are they now... eaten up by the big guys. Of course, lots of those big guys are out of business, on their way out of business, or just scraping by.
Good for the little guy - might dream big, but starts with a small realistic plan, and doesn't lose billions if it doesn't work.
The problem with big companies is that they can't see small. Every market they want to enter, they do so by spending millions of dollars. They try to hang a picture on the wall with a railroad spike, and are amazed at the size of the hole they create.
but why don't you set it up so that in future years you can put in what ever cable you want?
I always imagined having a duct built into the floor of my house, running along the walls, with a grate over top. I would run whatever in there, be it fibre or cat-5, etc.
And if I ever went wireless, I could just fill it up with beer and use a really long straw.
I've seen Kawa mentioned a few times. Was a light, fast IDE that allowed you to compile with multiple JDKs.
But, alas, Macromedia has said, "Effective October 31, 2001 Macromedia will discontinue the sale and future development of Kawa."
Because they use Codewright for editing code, I have a hard time believing it will be Open-Sourced. Another product tossed into the dustbin.
Re:Have a look at Kawa - Kawa is Gone
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
From Macromedia:
Effective October 31, 2001 Macromedia will discontinue the sale and future development of Kawa.
Macromedia strives to meet the needs of its customers and takes pride in creating market-leading products that span servers, authoring environments and media players.
In order to keep up with our customers' changing needs and focus on maintaining our status as a market-leader in Web development, servers and media players we are transitioning to a partnership strategy in the Java IDE market, and we have several partners that we feel are better suited to serving our customers' needs.
Macromedia values your support and understanding of this decision, and while there is no need to stop using Kawa, we wanted to make sure our Kawa customers were well taken care of. We realize you may have many questions; this FAQ was created to answer them.
----
Kawa was my favorite. Now Intellij IDEA (which I raved about in an earlier post).
Re:IntelliJ IDEA: the best IDE around! - I Agree
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
Some of the best features include:
- add an object that is on your classpath, but not in the "import" statement at the top of your file, and it will ask you if you want to add that import, and if you say Yes, do it automatically. You can also configure how many imports from a package before it goes to the "import *" for all classes from a packages.
- Select a bunch of code, hit CTRL-ALT-T, and it will ask if you want to wrap with an if-then, while, try-catch, try-catch-finally, etc. If you pick a try-catch wrapper, it will figure out what exceptions get thrown by the code, and add those exceptions. If it can't figure it out, it just uses the generic Exception.
- the interface is wonderful - lots of info available via sliding bars that disappear when you are done, maximizing the amount of space for writing code.
- great refactoring. Change a method signature or variable name, and it will help you convert all uses of that method/member to match the new signature/name/type
- good debugger
- written in Java (but fairly quick), and Linux is supported.
- very good code-completion (fast and accurate)
I have used Forte, JBuilder, Kawa, Visual Cafe and evaluated IBM's Visual Age. Intellij is the best I've come across. The amount of time an experienced developer can save is phenomenal. And unlike most automated bells and whisles of other products, the time-savers in Intellij do actually save you time.
You are relying on consumers knowing what they are purchasing - the ultimate flow of information.
Companies produce products in many different countries at different times, often contracting a factory for the production of a good.
How is the consumer to know where a company is getting a product producted?
Even some companies claim not to know about labour practices used to manufacture their products.
Your argument is pretty easy to make when living in the industrialized first world, wondering if your second car should be a Honda or Lexus. You'll get a much different perspective from someone who works 16 hours a day at twenty cents an hour.
Globalism and the Nation State
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
I consider this article by Katz highly simplistic. And to equate globalism with Sept 11th. Rather, blame American foreign policy, which one Canadian feminist called "soaked in blood".
Katz misses the whole threat of globalism - transnational corporations (TNCs) have in effect stolen power and the ability to make public policy from the nation-state.
TNCs are starting to eclipse smaller countries in terms of revenue, and with the ability to move capital and investments (and thus jobs) across the globe in the blink of an eye, nations are finding that they have to pander to these corporate monstrosities. As National Cash Register said, "We aren't an American company. We are an transnational company currently headquartered in the United States."
In globalism, we are making the same mistakes made during the Industrial Revolution. First, we focus on investment and capital, and let labor and the environment go to shit. Next, we'll try to incorporate some basic labor laws into the global picture. Then maybe we'll have a global agreement on the environment. That is, if TNCs don't block them.
Interesting reading on the subject includes The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen by Murray Dobin, and The Ingenuity Gap, by Thomas Homer-Dixon.
I forgot to remove the square of paper from the bottom of the heatsink/fan. It covered the thermal grease. I thought I had a bad processor, because my system would boot and then crash about 20 seconds later. I noticed in the BIOS that the temperature was too high.
I took it back to the shop, the techs peered at it, made ridiculous suggestions (turn down the heat in your house, point a fan at it, etc, etc).
Took it back to the sales desk, and a sales guy noticed the square of paper, and pulled it off.
Now, there were no instructions with the heat sink and fan indicating that this paper should be removed. Regardless, I felt a bit dumb.
The processor was fine, but.... I would suspect that the extra heat generated may have shortened the life of my CPU. Will only last 5 years instead of 10. Of course, I will upgrade in about 6 months, so who cares.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with cities polluting themselves is that corporations could move to the next city once they had done damage to the first, or even leave the country. Regardless, there are remedies like that (boycott the corporation).
Yes, you can sue a corporation that pollutes. Of course, you're replacing laws with lawsuits. Not saying this is worse - might be better. My crystal ball is a bit cloudy today. Unfortunately, when your kids come down with cancer, a lawsuit won't replace your child. And a lawsuit might not be enough of a stick to keep corporations in line.
Using public interest groups to certify corporate policy - that's interesting. So long as the public interest group is knowledgable enough, and uncorruptable. I remember seeing a story on 60 Minutes where corporations would undermine the process of getting the public to provide input on new laws. They would hire some slimy firm to call up little old ladies, and ask a carefully phrased question so that the answer they gave was what the corporation wanted ("Yes, I agree, medicare is bad"). The PR firm would then ask if they could write the letter to the congressman on behalf of the little old lady, and if she said yes, they would write it on kitty-cat notepaper, and supply her address and name as the return address.
Anyway, I'm Canadian, and that means "Peace, order and good government", not "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". I can see some workable ideas in what you are saying, but it could be a nightmare if the process gets hijacked. Remember, we don't have all those guns under our beds.
The update to the story implies that as video games get more violent, societal violence decreases.
I'm not saying that's not true, but that's a damned big assumption. Most sociologists say that violence in North America and Europe is on the decline due to demographics - a larger percentage of the population is older, due to the post war baby boom. Older people do not commit violet crime.
As to violent video games, I have no real opinion on the matter.
If you want Monsanto to clean up the mess, make all the executives in the company move with their families to the area. After all, PCBs are only "slightly tumorigenic".
You'd see a much more enthusiastic cleanup.
BTW, Monsanto does not have a great record. The company name is the maiden name of the wife of the founder. They got lucky, and got the contract to supply chemicals to a small company called Coca Cola. They made Agent Orange for the Vientam war, and were responsible for one of the first large industrial accidents in the US of A (a chemical-laden ship of theirs blew up in a harbour somewhere in the southern US, killing a bunch of people).
Glad to see that they haven't changed their tune. Next, they will explode a nuclear weapon over a heavily populated area.
"Let the city or county government enact rules as to what corporations or individuals can do now. If a corporation wants to, they can always move to a city that lets them do what they want to do..."
There's a small problem with that. The communities become businesses, competing with one another for business. "Sure, you can polute here so long as you create jobs".
Globalization has caused the same problem. When big American companies were pushing Free Trade, they talked about how it would create more jobs, mean more money, etc. And as soon is it got passed, they shut down plants in North America and moved them to Mexico where labour and environmental laws were lax.
In addition, PCBs in Alabama means PCBs in the Gulf of Mexico, which means PCBs in the seafood bought in New York or Seattle.
This is a global problem, not a local problem. Certain regulations should be world-wide. Competition should not be based on lax environmental laws and poor labour laws.
Yah, I agree, a bunch of regulations hasn't solved the problem either. Perhaps the law should change so that the punishment suits the crime. Make every Monsanto executive and their family move there and live in that poisoned environment, and then see how fast it gets cleaned up.
What made the novel truely disturbing was the alienation that the soldiers experienced upon returning home.
Because they travelled at the speed of light, a tour that lasted a year could mean that hundreds of years had passed back on Earth. The accepted norms and values of society had changed remarkably, and the soldiers had to try to adapt.
I suppose this alienation parallels the experience of Vietnam veterans, as Haldeman openly mentions that the book is really about Vietnam.
The Forever Peace, which has nothing to do with the Forever War, but is none-the-less a great book.
OK - I'm an idiot - your subject line implies sarcasm. Will go turn on brain now
Geesh - don't you read all the new articles? Adcritic went out of business, and the story was posted an hour before this one.
OK - that's damned funny. I forgot about Triumph.
Where does Helix ("Give me an R... R... Give me an O... O...."), that Canadian band at the zenith of bad hair and guitar riffs, stand on this important issue?
to take place sometime next year in Toronto.
You'd understand if you were Canadian.
An mp3-player with a USB slot, a digital camera with a USB slot, a Palm with a USB slot.
I mean, my 64 meg in my digital camera's compact flash cards are useless in my mp3 player (64 meg internal, and SmartMedia external). While using my camera, the 64 meg in my mp3 player is useless.
Most storage is used for temporary data. Would be nice to share that storage.
I don't expect that Palm, Nikkon, HP, Diamond, etc will radically change their products interfaces as a result of this one product, but it's nice to dream.
I'm sorry, my friend, but that's not the case at all.
For example, "Dr. Davis has been receiving a large number of emails from parents, who have had their children's hair analyzed for toxic chemicals. The preliminary results show that extraordinarily high levels of antimony and arsenic are being found in children with learning and behavioral disorders within the spectrum of autism." - from Crib Life.
Also, from Preventing Harm, states that, "Animal and human studies demonstrate that a variety of chemicals commonly encountered in industry and the home can contribute to developmental, learning, and behavioral disabilities" and that "[c]ertain genes may be susceptible to or cause individuals to be more susceptible to environmental "triggers." Particular vulnerability to a chemical exposure may be the result of a single or multiple interacting genes."
And finally, the jury is still out on the link between vaccination (especially the MMR - mumps/measles/rubella vacine) and autism. There are numerous doctors who believe their is a link, and just as many who say there is not.
So do you really believe that environment plays no role in autism?
Wow. Glad you cleared that up. Was beginning to worry. We humans can't predict the weather accurately 3 days in advance, but you know the effects of complex chemicals on humans from the time they are conceived until autism is detected?
.
"There simply hasn't been enough testing and research into the health hazards posed by low-level exposure to combinations of toxic chemicals. If anything, the experience of the semiconductor industry should be sobering -- the complexity of the chemical cocktails at use in modern high-tech industrial manufacturing is mind-boggling, and it is always getting more so. There is little chance, warn these experts, of ever catching up with the public health challenges inherent in new advances in technology, especially when the rate of change continues to accelerate." - Another quote from the
I've read that the levels of pollution in SV are pretty mind-boggling. While software development is "pollution free" (except for the crap we developers eat that mascarades as food), other industry there has not been so kind to the soil and water.
As Salon points out in this article, the situation is pretty dire.
From the New Almaden Mine in the Santa Cruz mountains, to the "largest plumes of poisoned groundwater in the United States, over 3 miles long and 180 feet deep, contaminated with xylene, toluene and other volatile organic compounds, including the chlorinated solvent trichloroethane (TCA)" that IBM left behind when manufacturing disk drives, there are some serious problems.
O's R would suggest that we look at this first, rather than at the genetics of the parents. Birds of a feather have flocked together for centuries, with no apparent ill effects.
and where are they now... eaten up by the big guys. Of course, lots of those big guys are out of business, on their way out of business, or just scraping by.
Good for the little guy - might dream big, but starts with a small realistic plan, and doesn't lose billions if it doesn't work.
The problem with big companies is that they can't see small. Every market they want to enter, they do so by spending millions of dollars. They try to hang a picture on the wall with a railroad spike, and are amazed at the size of the hole they create.
but why don't you set it up so that in future years you can put in what ever cable you want?
I always imagined having a duct built into the floor of my house, running along the walls, with a grate over top. I would run whatever in there, be it fibre or cat-5, etc.
And if I ever went wireless, I could just fill it up with beer and use a really long straw.
A low-bandwidth codec might have more success than DiVX (which, while lighter than mpeg-2, is still 800 meg for 90-100 minutes at decent quality).
Yes, and cel-phones and current technology can barely keep a phone conversation going without dropping it.
How will they do with downloading email, surfing the web, and watching a movie?
...my gallium arsenide quantum ternary clockless computer.
It's going to kick some wicked ass, especially with those 12-gigabyte multilayer CD-ROMS and fungus-based hard-drives.
I've seen Kawa mentioned a few times. Was a light, fast IDE that allowed you to compile with multiple JDKs.
But, alas, Macromedia has said, "Effective October 31, 2001 Macromedia will discontinue the sale and future development of Kawa."
Because they use Codewright for editing code, I have a hard time believing it will be Open-Sourced. Another product tossed into the dustbin.
From Macromedia:
Effective October 31, 2001 Macromedia will discontinue the sale and future development of Kawa.
Macromedia strives to meet the needs of its customers and takes pride in creating market-leading products that span servers, authoring environments and media players.
In order to keep up with our customers' changing needs and focus on maintaining our status as a market-leader in Web development, servers and media players we are transitioning to a partnership strategy in the Java IDE market, and we have several partners that we feel are better suited to serving our customers' needs.
Macromedia values your support and understanding of this decision, and while there is no need to stop using Kawa, we wanted to make sure our Kawa customers were well taken care of. We realize you may have many questions; this FAQ was created to answer them.
----
Kawa was my favorite. Now Intellij IDEA (which I raved about in an earlier post).
Some of the best features include:
- add an object that is on your classpath, but not in the "import" statement at the top of your file, and it will ask you if you want to add that import, and if you say Yes, do it automatically. You can also configure how many imports from a package before it goes to the "import *" for all classes from a packages.
- Select a bunch of code, hit CTRL-ALT-T, and it will ask if you want to wrap with an if-then, while, try-catch, try-catch-finally, etc. If you pick a try-catch wrapper, it will figure out what exceptions get thrown by the code, and add those exceptions. If it can't figure it out, it just uses the generic Exception.
- the interface is wonderful - lots of info available via sliding bars that disappear when you are done, maximizing the amount of space for writing code.
- great refactoring. Change a method signature or variable name, and it will help you convert all uses of that method/member to match the new signature/name/type
- good debugger
- written in Java (but fairly quick), and Linux is supported.
- very good code-completion (fast and accurate)
I have used Forte, JBuilder, Kawa, Visual Cafe and evaluated IBM's Visual Age. Intellij is the best I've come across. The amount of time an experienced developer can save is phenomenal. And unlike most automated bells and whisles of other products, the time-savers in Intellij do actually save you time.
David.
Boats.com
What?
Are you currently searching EBay for that "steal" on a 486-DX4-100?
You are relying on consumers knowing what they are purchasing - the ultimate flow of information.
Companies produce products in many different countries at different times, often contracting a factory for the production of a good.
How is the consumer to know where a company is getting a product producted?
Even some companies claim not to know about labour practices used to manufacture their products.
Your argument is pretty easy to make when living in the industrialized first world, wondering if your second car should be a Honda or Lexus. You'll get a much different perspective from someone who works 16 hours a day at twenty cents an hour.
I consider this article by Katz highly simplistic. And to equate globalism with Sept 11th. Rather, blame American foreign policy, which one Canadian feminist called "soaked in blood".
Katz misses the whole threat of globalism - transnational corporations (TNCs) have in effect stolen power and the ability to make public policy from the nation-state.
TNCs are starting to eclipse smaller countries in terms of revenue, and with the ability to move capital and investments (and thus jobs) across the globe in the blink of an eye, nations are finding that they have to pander to these corporate monstrosities. As National Cash Register said, "We aren't an American company. We are an transnational company currently headquartered in the United States."
In globalism, we are making the same mistakes made during the Industrial Revolution. First, we focus on investment and capital, and let labor and the environment go to shit. Next, we'll try to incorporate some basic labor laws into the global picture. Then maybe we'll have a global agreement on the environment. That is, if TNCs don't block them.
Interesting reading on the subject includes The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen by Murray Dobin, and The Ingenuity Gap, by Thomas Homer-Dixon.
I forgot to remove the square of paper from the bottom of the heatsink/fan. It covered the thermal grease. I thought I had a bad processor, because my system would boot and then crash about 20 seconds later. I noticed in the BIOS that the temperature was too high.
I took it back to the shop, the techs peered at it, made ridiculous suggestions (turn down the heat in your house, point a fan at it, etc, etc).
Took it back to the sales desk, and a sales guy noticed the square of paper, and pulled it off.
Now, there were no instructions with the heat sink and fan indicating that this paper should be removed. Regardless, I felt a bit dumb.
The processor was fine, but.... I would suspect that the extra heat generated may have shortened the life of my CPU. Will only last 5 years instead of 10. Of course, I will upgrade in about 6 months, so who cares.