I've worked at a French company here in the States and I've also worked at a few homegrown, American ones. The difference was less than stunning. Same pay, same benefits, same cubicles, same projects, same Harvard MBA-driven culture. And the company paid taxes in this country as well, as does Chrysler and countless other foreign-owned businesses that employ millions of Americans. It's a global economy, so whether you're a wage slave at Boeing or Airbus matters little, if at all.
It is the right of the United States, and Great Britain (which shares the information, and has the European Echelon headquarters), in order to defend their industries.
No, it is not the right of the United States. If a company wants to spend its own money on industrial espionage, fine, it should do what needs to be done in order to maximize shareholder value. But don't tell me I have some kind of moral obligation to support corporate interests with my tax dollars, either through Echelon or the countless existing corporate tax breaks.
I know. Just trying to preempt the predictable "America has the highest standard of living" (it doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination) and "strongest economy" (like the vast majority benefits from that) bullshit you constantly hear whenever a debate is opposing the American and European way of life.
Yeah, well, trust the New Left to patch that and other irksome incompatibilities between the European and American business, I mean political, models. I wonder what pathetic travesty the socio-prostitutes in power will come up with next. So many ills, so little time to undo a century of anti-competitive laws that've led the vast majority of West Europeans to live in abject poverty unfathomable in a country where the market reigns supreme.
As for China's efforts to control and crack down on the use of the Internet, the president is dismissive, wishing Chinese leaders, "Good luck--that's like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."
So, given that this is exactly what our all-American, pro-democratic leaders are trying to do right here at home, either one of the following must be true:
a. They are chauvinist to the point of believing that noone outside of this country can succeed in regulating the internet, least of all some yellow bastards.
b. They are pathological liars, having long ago forfeited any claims to consistency between their high-minded words and repugnant actions.
.. note that the above are by no means mutually exclusive.
Well, you sure as hell don't get to fly to Yokohama in business.:)
As a side note, it either amuses or bewilders me (the feelings are not exactly clear yet) that a lot of corporate retreats such as this one take place in uselessly remote and exotic sites. And this at a time when the chosen few try bilking their employees or organization's members out of every last fucking dollar.
Yeah, great point. Take on what possibly is the last remaining well-paying wage-slave sector in this country and equalize global salaries by the bottom.
I hope you were being sarcastic, because we all know what "competing" in the global marketplace means. Don't want to put in 16 hour work days with one week vacation you'll never take and 50% copay? Well, I know a kid in Kyrgyzstan who'd be more than happy to write that app.
Easily dismissed as the ramblings of an insecure, xenophobic fool those ideas are, aren't they? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer if our government put pressure on other countries to increase the standard of living and social protections instead of preventing them from doing so and making long-term losers of the peoples of the First, Second and Third worlds alike.
No, I'm fully conscious of the fact that even if an individual manages to accumulate enough wealth in his lifetime to become a discriminate consumer (health foods, clean habitat, increased privacy), he will remain just that - a consumer. One differentiated from less fortunate peers only by degree; as accountant-slaves in antiquity were better off but still in the same predicament as their galley-manning brethren. Unfortunately, I've all but exhausted my pool of ideas regarding the improvement of existing power relationships. And looking at the ultimately unsuccessful struggle for the betterment of individuals' rights in a corrupt capitalist world, witnessing the ever-increasing momentum behind the rollback of existing protections, I'm afraid I can't honestly feel empowered to do much but try to construct a modestly bearable existence on my own.
I'd love to see a reawakening of popular will or a miraculous change in the attitude of governments toward corporate predations, but I'm afraid it simply will not happen.
This has been debated ad-naueseam in intro policsci classes around the world. Yes, theoretically feasible balanced models are possible and yes, they have been implemented on a small scale by a handful of privately held companies. But when you face a conference room full of angry investors who've seen their wealth diminished by your inability to beat Wall Street's profit expectations this quarter, ideas such as long term, social responsibility and eco-capitalism suddenly seem to lose much of their luster.
Corporations do not destroy the environment, oppress workers or curtail civil liberties because they are inherently evil or because the world's top management is devoted to the suffering of others. They do it because it's the most profitable, expedient way of conducting business in the existing market and it has been so for ages. In other words, noone is going to change a time-proven formula for generating profits unless forced to by government coercion. And we all know how far-fetched the idea of structural government intervention into business matters has become since the early 1980s.
Forget about eco-capitalism. Pick up a book on programming and learn how to make money and put yourself in a position where you can make some choices in your lifestyle instead.
Wow, I got my weather forecast right before I left for work, in about 1 second and with no per-call charges. Let's hope the weather doesn't change too much in the next twenty minutes!
Those who think commercialization of space is the next great leap for our civilization, go read the article. Pay special attention to the parts that discuss NASA's intention to sell the rights to footage obtained from the ISS to the highest bidder, thereby eliminating a tradition of making these materials public and freely accessible. Also consider the references to embedding sponsors' logos into images and video footage sent from the ISS. Don't skip over the part where NASA sheepishly defends its right to freely distribute a small subset of ISS-produced material untaintained by commercial information. Read and weep, and, twenty years from now, tell your kids about the times when information, or at least the best part of it, was free.*
* Or at least paid for by citizens' tax dollars that went into its production and not toward another round of Disney tax breaks.
Illegal spammers? Would that include the NASDAQ-trading, inernet economy-sustaining, politically donating companies that opt you in no matter what you say and opt you out only when somebody sells them a list of recently deceased people whose families might be interested in discounts on funeral arrangements? Nah, that's as legal as it gets, isn't it. After all, millions mean respectability and with spam as with everything else in this world, whoever's got the money got the (il)legal ride.
At least with small-time spammers, you can have their ISP shut the account down. Now try doing the same when the spammer is an A-list client on Exodus.
BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.
The reason I and others are jumping to conclusions about CAUCE's complacence and implicit support of large-scale spammers is that despite the bellicous talk, little is done to thwart even simple abuses like this one. If FloNetwork is indeed displaying what I presume to be a trademarked logo without authorization, why don't you, as a board member, pressure your peers to heed the advice of people in n.a.n-a.e and deal with the situation instead of getting defensive over someone stating the obvious? As I said, I appreciate what CAUCE stands for and realize that it's been beneficial to the net community. Recent developments, however, paint an all too strange picture of an organization losing its bite and, by extension, the respect it has managed to gather.
.. briefly, thus, why hasn't CAUCE sued the shit out of FloNetwork?
Being able to watch select shows without access to a TV set or cable sounds like a cool idea. Of course cable companies will not take kindly to a service that allows people to enjoy their product without paying for the service.
Not spam per se, so feel free to mod this as off-topic. Does anyone know what the deal is with freshmeat? I've put their ad server (ads.freshmeat.net) into my junkbuster blocklist, but the ads still keep appearing. Has anyone encountered the same problem?
CAUCE support has come to mean about as much as a TRUSTe banner. When you have an anti-spam group endorsing such obnoxious, unresponsive and lying spammers as FloNetwork, you know not to trust (no pun intended) it too much.
Sadly, it seems that just like the maintainers of the RBL, CAUCE doesn't have the cojones to bring the fight to the larger corporate spammers. Sure, taking on the Sanford Wallaces of the world was commendable, but this isn't 1997. The internet has evolved and we are now faced with entities vastly more insidious than some entrepreneur in a Miami basement. And when major abusers such as FloNetwork client buy.com (I hope y'all liked their Spring spam run, especially those who never signed up for their opt in list) keep spamming without any response from CAUCE and other likeminded groups, you know time has come to reconsider who the "good guys" really are.
Re:Its time to flame these retards into oblivion.
on
Attacking Open Source
·
· Score: 1
Exactly, even if the parent was probably intended as sarcasm. Obviously, Slashdot has what many would consider a "radical" stance on issues such as privacy or copyright. So why not extend it to Free Software, Linux included? Who gives a shit whether a non-initiated luser, marketing drone, or barely literate MCSE thinks that the Free Software community is extreme and overbearing in its rhetoric and practice?
Free Software is here, Linux is here, they've been around since before Slashdot, since before it was cool or even practical to run Linux on your desktop. What with the current desire to shift our (as in those who appreciate GNU/Linux) approach to political issues in order to please total outsiders? No one was born a Linux user or Free Software advocate, but many have come to understand the ideology and love the technology it's produced. If others follow the same path and come to similar conclusions, great. If they don't, fine. But it's not the community's prerogative to change its approach in order to entice them into our ranks.
Keep it radical, keep it aggressive, or watch it dilute into a half-assed, focus group-driven, Windows alternative.
Good for you. Now if you think that your "Inc." and its $10k of revenues a year mean anything to those in power, go back to the sandbox and play with the rest of the Sunday school bunch.
What you have to realize is that the "government control" you speak of is nothing but corporate will codeified into state regulations. When the government acts on behalf of the people, as in labor or equal opportunity laws, it benefits society. When it acts as the legal and enforcement arm of the corporate world, it deserves to be snubbed by the citizens it's betrayed.
I remember reading once on Ivanopoulo's site an email exchange he'd had with Macromedia, after the makers of Flash and Dreamweaver discovered that he'd been cracking their software. From what I recall, it began with the typical intimidating lawyer talk, and ended with the corp realizing the pointlessness of the exercise.
Endlessly amusing. Imagine that, an individual telling a company to fuck off and being able to go on with his life! Haven't seen in America for at least ten years.
to see this wonderful side-effect of globalization. Bet this is not exactly what the corporations and their government lackeys had in mind when they were speaking of the unfettered flow of goods and information.
Slashdot Mirror
.. got to Creative's site instead and help out with the DXR2 drivers.
It will not spam the users with promotional email
Of course not. And neither will our valued business partners.
I've worked at a French company here in the States and I've also worked at a few homegrown, American ones. The difference was less than stunning. Same pay, same benefits, same cubicles, same projects, same Harvard MBA-driven culture. And the company paid taxes in this country as well, as does Chrysler and countless other foreign-owned businesses that employ millions of Americans. It's a global economy, so whether you're a wage slave at Boeing or Airbus matters little, if at all.
It is the right of the United States, and Great Britain (which shares the information, and has the European Echelon headquarters), in order to defend their industries.
No, it is not the right of the United States. If a company wants to spend its own money on industrial espionage, fine, it should do what needs to be done in order to maximize shareholder value. But don't tell me I have some kind of moral obligation to support corporate interests with my tax dollars, either through Echelon or the countless existing corporate tax breaks.
I know. Just trying to preempt the predictable "America has the highest standard of living" (it doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination) and "strongest economy" (like the vast majority benefits from that) bullshit you constantly hear whenever a debate is opposing the American and European way of life.
Yeah, well, trust the New Left to patch that and other irksome incompatibilities between the European and American business, I mean political, models. I wonder what pathetic travesty the socio-prostitutes in power will come up with next. So many ills, so little time to undo a century of anti-competitive laws that've led the vast majority of West Europeans to live in abject poverty unfathomable in a country where the market reigns supreme.
As for China's efforts to control and crack down on the use of the Internet, the president is dismissive, wishing Chinese leaders, "Good luck--that's like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."
So, given that this is exactly what our all-American, pro-democratic leaders are trying to do right here at home, either one of the following must be true:
a. They are chauvinist to the point of believing that noone outside of this country can succeed in regulating the internet, least of all some yellow bastards.
b. They are pathological liars, having long ago forfeited any claims to consistency between their high-minded words and repugnant actions.
.. note that the above are by no means mutually exclusive.
Well, you sure as hell don't get to fly to Yokohama in business. :)
As a side note, it either amuses or bewilders me (the feelings are not exactly clear yet) that a lot of corporate retreats such as this one take place in uselessly remote and exotic sites. And this at a time when the chosen few try bilking their employees or organization's members out of every last fucking dollar.
Yeah, great point. Take on what possibly is the last remaining well-paying wage-slave sector in this country and equalize global salaries by the bottom.
I hope you were being sarcastic, because we all know what "competing" in the global marketplace means. Don't want to put in 16 hour work days with one week vacation you'll never take and 50% copay? Well, I know a kid in Kyrgyzstan who'd be more than happy to write that app.
Easily dismissed as the ramblings of an insecure, xenophobic fool those ideas are, aren't they? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer if our government put pressure on other countries to increase the standard of living and social protections instead of preventing them from doing so and making long-term losers of the peoples of the First, Second and Third worlds alike.
No, I'm fully conscious of the fact that even if an individual manages to accumulate enough wealth in his lifetime to become a discriminate consumer (health foods, clean habitat, increased privacy), he will remain just that - a consumer. One differentiated from less fortunate peers only by degree; as accountant-slaves in antiquity were better off but still in the same predicament as their galley-manning brethren. Unfortunately, I've all but exhausted my pool of ideas regarding the improvement of existing power relationships. And looking at the ultimately unsuccessful struggle for the betterment of individuals' rights in a corrupt capitalist world, witnessing the ever-increasing momentum behind the rollback of existing protections, I'm afraid I can't honestly feel empowered to do much but try to construct a modestly bearable existence on my own.
I'd love to see a reawakening of popular will or a miraculous change in the attitude of governments toward corporate predations, but I'm afraid it simply will not happen.
This has been debated ad-naueseam in intro policsci classes around the world. Yes, theoretically feasible balanced models are possible and yes, they have been implemented on a small scale by a handful of privately held companies. But when you face a conference room full of angry investors who've seen their wealth diminished by your inability to beat Wall Street's profit expectations this quarter, ideas such as long term, social responsibility and eco-capitalism suddenly seem to lose much of their luster.
Corporations do not destroy the environment, oppress workers or curtail civil liberties because they are inherently evil or because the world's top management is devoted to the suffering of others. They do it because it's the most profitable, expedient way of conducting business in the existing market and it has been so for ages. In other words, noone is going to change a time-proven formula for generating profits unless forced to by government coercion. And we all know how far-fetched the idea of structural government intervention into business matters has become since the early 1980s.
Forget about eco-capitalism. Pick up a book on programming and learn how to make money and put yourself in a position where you can make some choices in your lifestyle instead.
Wow, I got my weather forecast right before I left for work, in about 1 second and with no per-call charges. Let's hope the weather doesn't change too much in the next twenty minutes!
.. and, hey, watch out for those open manholes. ;)
Those who think commercialization of space is the next great leap for our civilization, go read the article. Pay special attention to the parts that discuss NASA's intention to sell the rights to footage obtained from the ISS to the highest bidder, thereby eliminating a tradition of making these materials public and freely accessible. Also consider the references to embedding sponsors' logos into images and video footage sent from the ISS. Don't skip over the part where NASA sheepishly defends its right to freely distribute a small subset of ISS-produced material untaintained by commercial information. Read and weep, and, twenty years from now, tell your kids about the times when information, or at least the best part of it, was free.*
* Or at least paid for by citizens' tax dollars that went into its production and not toward another round of Disney tax breaks.
Illegal spammers? Would that include the NASDAQ-trading, inernet economy-sustaining, politically donating companies that opt you in no matter what you say and opt you out only when somebody sells them a list of recently deceased people whose families might be interested in discounts on funeral arrangements? Nah, that's as legal as it gets, isn't it. After all, millions mean respectability and with spam as with everything else in this world, whoever's got the money got the (il)legal ride.
At least with small-time spammers, you can have their ISP shut the account down. Now try doing the same when the spammer is an A-list client on Exodus.
BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.
The reason I and others are jumping to conclusions about CAUCE's complacence and implicit support of large-scale spammers is that despite the bellicous talk, little is done to thwart even simple abuses like this one. If FloNetwork is indeed displaying what I presume to be a trademarked logo without authorization, why don't you, as a board member, pressure your peers to heed the advice of people in n.a.n-a.e and deal with the situation instead of getting defensive over someone stating the obvious? As I said, I appreciate what CAUCE stands for and realize that it's been beneficial to the net community. Recent developments, however, paint an all too strange picture of an organization losing its bite and, by extension, the respect it has managed to gather.
.. briefly, thus, why hasn't CAUCE sued the shit out of FloNetwork?
Being able to watch select shows without access to a TV set or cable sounds like a cool idea. Of course cable companies will not take kindly to a service that allows people to enjoy their product without paying for the service.
Not spam per se, so feel free to mod this as off-topic. Does anyone know what the deal is with freshmeat? I've put their ad server (ads.freshmeat.net) into my junkbuster blocklist, but the ads still keep appearing. Has anyone encountered the same problem?
CAUCE support has come to mean about as much as a TRUSTe banner. When you have an anti-spam group endorsing such obnoxious, unresponsive and lying spammers as FloNetwork, you know not to trust (no pun intended) it too much.
Sadly, it seems that just like the maintainers of the RBL, CAUCE doesn't have the cojones to bring the fight to the larger corporate spammers. Sure, taking on the Sanford Wallaces of the world was commendable, but this isn't 1997. The internet has evolved and we are now faced with entities vastly more insidious than some entrepreneur in a Miami basement. And when major abusers such as FloNetwork client buy.com (I hope y'all liked their Spring spam run, especially those who never signed up for their opt in list) keep spamming without any response from CAUCE and other likeminded groups, you know time has come to reconsider who the "good guys" really are.
/me watches as the Randroids come out screaming.
Exactly, even if the parent was probably intended as sarcasm. Obviously, Slashdot has what many would consider a "radical" stance on issues such as privacy or copyright. So why not extend it to Free Software, Linux included? Who gives a shit whether a non-initiated luser, marketing drone, or barely literate MCSE thinks that the Free Software community is extreme and overbearing in its rhetoric and practice?
Free Software is here, Linux is here, they've been around since before Slashdot, since before it was cool or even practical to run Linux on your desktop. What with the current desire to shift our (as in those who appreciate GNU/Linux) approach to political issues in order to please total outsiders? No one was born a Linux user or Free Software advocate, but many have come to understand the ideology and love the technology it's produced. If others follow the same path and come to similar conclusions, great. If they don't, fine. But it's not the community's prerogative to change its approach in order to entice them into our ranks.Keep it radical, keep it aggressive, or watch it dilute into a half-assed, focus group-driven, Windows alternative.
Mea culpa .. I must've inserted a "start reading the NYT" in there somewhere. So much for drinking on Sunday afternoons.
Good for you. Now if you think that your "Inc." and its $10k of revenues a year mean anything to those in power, go back to the sandbox and play with the rest of the Sunday school bunch.
What you have to realize is that the "government control" you speak of is nothing but corporate will codeified into state regulations. When the government acts on behalf of the people, as in labor or equal opportunity laws, it benefits society. When it acts as the legal and enforcement arm of the corporate world, it deserves to be snubbed by the citizens it's betrayed.
I remember reading once on Ivanopoulo's site an email exchange he'd had with Macromedia, after the makers of Flash and Dreamweaver discovered that he'd been cracking their software. From what I recall, it began with the typical intimidating lawyer talk, and ended with the corp realizing the pointlessness of the exercise.
Endlessly amusing. Imagine that, an individual telling a company to fuck off and being able to go on with his life! Haven't seen in America for at least ten years.to see this wonderful side-effect of globalization. Bet this is not exactly what the corporations and their government lackeys had in mind when they were speaking of the unfettered flow of goods and information.