Re:PCBs have nothing to do with GM foods
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Do you know who's going to pay that 500 million?
You are.
Unless you get yourself some solar panels for your house.
Re:Think Monsanto are bad? Check out Union Carbide
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
What if Union Carbide had built that gas tank out of a skin twice as thick, or of a metal that did not rust, or otherwise took greater precautions to prevent an accident.
Their bottom line would be affected, because those precautions cost money. They'd either have to take a cut in profits due to this increased expense, or they'd have to take a loss in marketshare when they passed on this cost to the consumer, and consequently had a higher sale price for their products. Either way, somebody made a call somewhere to scale-back the engineering of those gas tanks, or safety procedures (I'm not familliar with the exact cause of the accident).
Such decisions are often made, completely isolated from potential circumstances. I'm guessing it was probably an accountant that made that decision, with little understanding of how it would impact the safety of the plant. You can't really in clear conscience trace blame back to a bean counter. Even if it was possible to follow the trail of blame back. But corporations necessarily are groups of people working in concert. Folks all down the chain of command probably shared some responsibility, but you can't really say that one person decided that having profits was better than not killing people.
On the other hand, what might have prevented an accident like Bhopal would be for the government to have strict safety regulations regarding the procedures in handling these materials, and frequently inspect and enforce those regulations, and fine the fuck out of the company for violations - and what is currently NOT done, impose judicial oversight, so that there is a paper trail pointing back to the decision makers. THEN we can put those people in jail if they refuse to obey the regulations.
Who pays for all these inspectors and regulators? Well, who is profiting from producing products using these hazardous materials? The victims had to bear the risk, while UC profitted. I think that the people who profit directly need to pay for these kinds of things.
However, in the current system, these things are paid for by taxes on individuals and consumers.
As someone else pointed out - profit is privatized, while risk and loss are socialized.
Re:Where do guys like you come from?
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Right, and when a plane crashes, it's the mechanic's fault, not the accountant who decided to cut the airline's maintenance budget by 5%, or the plane manufacturer, who under-engineered the wing-struts by a thousandth of an inch to bring the cost down, (and the airline exec who decided to go with the cheaper, marginally less-safe plane).
See? It gets complicated real quick. But that doesn't mean that we should pick the simple answer (blame the mechanic) when it's wrong.
The only problem with this strategy is that often, the ones who make these decisions actually do not. They're patsies for someone higher up who gives a vague directive, so that it's hard to prove that the higher-up individual is guilty of the crime, even if the stooge individual rats them out.
Hard to prove means, hard (expensive) to prosecute, hard (unlikely) to convict.
Although I agree that an effort should be made. Put enough stooges in prison, and they'll have a hard time finding more stooges to do their dirty work.
Al Qaieda DID engage in legitimate business.
They ran several charities as "fronts". These charities funnelled money to Al Qaida operations, but also did not insignificant charity work, feeding and housing poor children and widows. . .
Re:Evolution and the corporate lifeform
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Corporations cannot be defined as life, because they do not reproduce. They spontaneously generate, and endure indefinately.
What if Monsanto then proceeded to BUY all of the land in the affected town, and had the residents pay rent or move out?
Then, under a Libertarian regime, they could pollute their own land however they wanted. And if the people of that town got sick and died, it would be their own fault.
- -
or better still, lets go back in time, and apply a Libertarian Regime to the start of this crisis. You see, a Libertarian Regime would NOT have imposed product safety standards, or done testing that found PCBs harmful. Company propaganda would say that PCB is good for you. So when people in the town started getting sick and dying, they might put 2 and 2 together, and try to sue, but the judge would throw it out, of course, because an army of highly paid corporate lawyers makes more sense than the pro-bono guy the townspeople got.
Later, people would say they've got PCBs in the soil, they suspect it's from the company, but no news of this would ever reach the public at large, because the media would be owned by that company as surely as AOL owns CNN today. There would be no large independent scientific organizations that would be capable of proving that the PCBs were from the company, or that they were capable of causing harm. The only scientists that COULD do this would be corporate-funded. Scientists from a competing company might be motivated to so something, but would likely be sued into submission for revealing trade secrets or trademark violation or some shit like that. Then the Monsanto scientists would likely conclude that the PCBs were naturally occuring (as PG&E did with hexavalent chromium, as Chevron has tried to do with an oil spill in California).
The poor people of this town could not afford the very real and very necessary costs of PROVING the guilt of the corporation, because of the very real cost of studies, and legal action.
Recently, we saw with the Enron fiasco, a huge pool of unemployed people, who not only lost their jobs, but they lost their 401k savings, which they paid into for years - when the company went bankrupt - a mere month after the executives awarded themselves the largest bonus package in company history.
Clearly, the "evil corporation" is not to blame here. It is the actions of individuals. Unfortunately, the current state of law (and enforcement of that law) is such that individuals who run corporations or make strategic decisions, are not personally, morally, or ethically, responsible for the outcome of those decisions. THIS is the root of the problem.
I know that many hackers here on slashdot, be they white hat or black, live under the constant threat of incarceration and all the ass-raping and upheaval of personal life that would entail, merely for being suspected or accused of wrongdoing.
Why don't the extremely highly paid executives and board memebers, the ones who make these decisions, live under the same fear? Why is there no "crime and punishment" factor involved in this decision making process?
This still does not adequately punish the individuals who made decisions that were tanatmount to murder. Or at least manslaughter.
Those individuals will be financially ruined, yes. But don't you think that some of these individuals deserve jail time? A little quality time with a very large, affectionate inmate who's into long walks on the beach, dry martinis, and bending their smaller, weaker, and prettier cell mates over for a good, rough, buggering three times a day?
Otherwise, forming a corporation and willfully taking someone's life could be a loophole for getting out of a prison sentance or hangman's noose.
Where's the JUSTICE?
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Personally, I'd feel more comfortable if they spent more money on safety testing that they did on marketing.
(of course, the safety-test funds should go into a neutral-industry trust fund, which fuels a government or at least, independent university scientist testing organization, or something like Underwriters Laboratories - we can't have safety testing if there is even an appearance of conflict of interest. Say what you will about libertarian philosophy on keeping the government out of the business of private citizens, but the fact remains that bias and conflict of interest would render the whole issue moot - and frequently does today.)
I saw the trailers and I can't for the life of me figure out why in god's name a creature with HUGE fangs, is lugging around an acorn. Don't herbivores have flat teeth? What carnivore, pray tell, eats acorns.
After that, I just couldn't involve myself enough to enjoy the utterly cliched slapstick shamelessly stolen from a thousand Road Runner shorts.
And the reason I think it's so uber-cool is because it's not brainlessly trying to look like Japanimation (like recent Disney efforts). The French influence is very strong - it almost has that 1970's French comic-book look to it. And as a die-hard Moebius fan, that makes me very happy.
I also like the way they did the CGI. It's very laid back, and it gives the 3d motion a lot of life that would otherwise be missing in hand-drawn animation. But UNLIKE the same attempt in The Iron Giant, it doesn't jump off the screen and smack you in the face with "CGI precision!!!". It retains some semblance of unity. The only problem I had with it was the running scene at the end, there girl running looked a bit stiff and unnatural. There's just something that hand animators do that CGI just can't seem to handle yet, and that's the human form at a gallop.
(in all fairness, I think that Pixar licked that one in Monsters. Hell, they even got the pee-pee dance down!)
What I'm afraid of is when movies like "Antz" do better at the box office than movies like "A Bug's Life".
Then, the era of "garbage CGI" will have truly dawned. Understand that Pixar are geeks. They get into nerdy things like developing the next coolest rendering technology. IIRC, "Gerri's Game" (the short about an old man who gets into a chess game with himself, and loses) was more of a technology demonstration about rendering hair more realistically - a proof of concept for the technology in Monsters Inc.
Us geeks watched Monsters Inc. and wowed over the supremely cool hair rendering, and wondered where they got enough CPU to do it all. While the "unwashed masses" went to go see a piece of crap like Jimmy Neutron, which was, while amusing, - it was technically a peice of crap. In the end, per dollar invested up front in engineering and production quality, I'll bet movies like Jimmy Neutron are going to end up being more profitable in the end. Which sucks.
Which business model do YOU think Hollywood will favor?
eh? I don't think you've ever had direct experience with people at this level in large software companies. Especially in the non-technical or management roles. They not only CAN be this way, they mostly ARE this way.
I don't doubt it's legitimacy, neither am I 100% convinced either. But my doubts aren't based on the language. They're based on the simple fact that we can't verify the source. On the other hand, I have no idea how Microsoft could think they would possibly benefit from intentionally leaking something like this - unless it was sent out with subtle wording differences to different people, in order to catch the leaker (as Steve Jobs has done at Apple).
you can pop mail ONLY if pop is enabled on the Exchange server.
My organization does not enable pop mail because they see it as a security risk - even though this kind of tracking is easily circumvented (as zillions of other posters have already pointed out).
". . . fly into a rage because Microsoft decides that paying attention to customers and giving them what they want for a better price is a good idea."
But you see, that's *NOT* what he's suggesting here. Of course, he's SAYING that's what they're doing (rah rah go team), but then he goes on to instruct his sales force on how to use smoke and mirrors to get customers to decide on Microsoft products (or rather, to root out the loose-cannons in customer organizations that are stealth-installing Linux for small projects, etc.)
This is Microsoft's way of attacking Linux. Investing an $80,000+bonuses salary in a lying-ass-sack-of-shit salesperson is more cost-effective than hiring two QA engineers.
In the end, it does nothing towards giving customers what they want for a better price. Microsoft's new licensing strategy for XP, and the complete lack of any technical improvement over Win2k proves this.
Oh, HE may know that, but his dumb-ass sales force probably doesn't. Sales people in the software industry are dumb as shit. This Exchange tracking feature is a well-known scare-tactic by bad managers everywhere. (bad managers are managers that don't understand how to manage people through tactics other than negativism and intimidation - they do not understand that the best way to manage is team-building).
I'm sure he knows that a determined leaker is going to leak this mail via copy-paste or some other method. I'm also sure he knows that probably 80% of his people are too stupid to try something like that. He's trying to discourage the casual leakers.
This is the "soul" of the whole "copy-protection" philosophy, isn't it? The same philosophy born in Bill Gates' infamous "letter to software hobbyists" back in ancient times.
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He has a point about how Microsoft *should* be concerned about Linux as a competitor. I know my company is DEEPLY concerned about our competitor's products, and we are doing everything we can to tit-for-tat make our product better than theirs, without getting into the dreaded "checkbox war". What we are NOT doing is instructing our sales force on strategies for dishonestly slandering our competition. If Microsoft falls onto hard times in the future, this guy will have an excellent chance at building a new career as a used-car salesman. He has all the necessary skills.
Urban legend has it that Henry Ford's best friend was killed in a Model T prototype. That incident caused Ford to install safety glass in all of their cars from that point on.
Aren't you glad Henry Ford's best friend was cut to ribbons? I know I am. We need more corporations testing their products on their friends and family!
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Do you know who's going to pay that 500 million?
You are.
Unless you get yourself some solar panels for your house.
What if Union Carbide had built that gas tank out of a skin twice as thick, or of a metal that did not rust, or otherwise took greater precautions to prevent an accident.
Their bottom line would be affected, because those precautions cost money. They'd either have to take a cut in profits due to this increased expense, or they'd have to take a loss in marketshare when they passed on this cost to the consumer, and consequently had a higher sale price for their products. Either way, somebody made a call somewhere to scale-back the engineering of those gas tanks, or safety procedures (I'm not familliar with the exact cause of the accident).
Such decisions are often made, completely isolated from potential circumstances. I'm guessing it was probably an accountant that made that decision, with little understanding of how it would impact the safety of the plant. You can't really in clear conscience trace blame back to a bean counter. Even if it was possible to follow the trail of blame back. But corporations necessarily are groups of people working in concert. Folks all down the chain of command probably shared some responsibility, but you can't really say that one person decided that having profits was better than not killing people.
On the other hand, what might have prevented an accident like Bhopal would be for the government to have strict safety regulations regarding the procedures in handling these materials, and frequently inspect and enforce those regulations, and fine the fuck out of the company for violations - and what is currently NOT done, impose judicial oversight, so that there is a paper trail pointing back to the decision makers. THEN we can put those people in jail if they refuse to obey the regulations.
Who pays for all these inspectors and regulators? Well, who is profiting from producing products using these hazardous materials? The victims had to bear the risk, while UC profitted. I think that the people who profit directly need to pay for these kinds of things.
However, in the current system, these things are paid for by taxes on individuals and consumers.
As someone else pointed out - profit is privatized, while risk and loss are socialized.
I *know*!
They're doing the same thing with DHMO!
www.dhmo.org
Right, and when a plane crashes, it's the mechanic's fault, not the accountant who decided to cut the airline's maintenance budget by 5%, or the plane manufacturer, who under-engineered the wing-struts by a thousandth of an inch to bring the cost down, (and the airline exec who decided to go with the cheaper, marginally less-safe plane).
See? It gets complicated real quick. But that doesn't mean that we should pick the simple answer (blame the mechanic) when it's wrong.
The only problem with this strategy is that often, the ones who make these decisions actually do not. They're patsies for someone higher up who gives a vague directive, so that it's hard to prove that the higher-up individual is guilty of the crime, even if the stooge individual rats them out.
Hard to prove means, hard (expensive) to prosecute, hard (unlikely) to convict.
Although I agree that an effort should be made. Put enough stooges in prison, and they'll have a hard time finding more stooges to do their dirty work.
Al Qaieda DID engage in legitimate business.
They ran several charities as "fronts". These charities funnelled money to Al Qaida operations, but also did not insignificant charity work, feeding and housing poor children and widows. . .
Corporations cannot be defined as life, because they do not reproduce. They spontaneously generate, and endure indefinately.
Corporations are Undead.
Okay then, I'll bite.
What if Monsanto then proceeded to BUY all of the land in the affected town, and had the residents pay rent or move out?
Then, under a Libertarian regime, they could pollute their own land however they wanted. And if the people of that town got sick and died, it would be their own fault.
- -
or better still, lets go back in time, and apply a Libertarian Regime to the start of this crisis. You see, a Libertarian Regime would NOT have imposed product safety standards, or done testing that found PCBs harmful. Company propaganda would say that PCB is good for you. So when people in the town started getting sick and dying, they might put 2 and 2 together, and try to sue, but the judge would throw it out, of course, because an army of highly paid corporate lawyers makes more sense than the pro-bono guy the townspeople got.
Later, people would say they've got PCBs in the soil, they suspect it's from the company, but no news of this would ever reach the public at large, because the media would be owned by that company as surely as AOL owns CNN today. There would be no large independent scientific organizations that would be capable of proving that the PCBs were from the company, or that they were capable of causing harm. The only scientists that COULD do this would be corporate-funded. Scientists from a competing company might be motivated to so something, but would likely be sued into submission for revealing trade secrets or trademark violation or some shit like that. Then the Monsanto scientists would likely conclude that the PCBs were naturally occuring (as PG&E did with hexavalent chromium, as Chevron has tried to do with an oil spill in California).
The poor people of this town could not afford the very real and very necessary costs of PROVING the guilt of the corporation, because of the very real cost of studies, and legal action.
sounds like the middle finger of the invisible hand to me.
Recently, we saw with the Enron fiasco, a huge pool of unemployed people, who not only lost their jobs, but they lost their 401k savings, which they paid into for years - when the company went bankrupt - a mere month after the executives awarded themselves the largest bonus package in company history.
Clearly, the "evil corporation" is not to blame here. It is the actions of individuals. Unfortunately, the current state of law (and enforcement of that law) is such that individuals who run corporations or make strategic decisions, are not personally, morally, or ethically, responsible for the outcome of those decisions. THIS is the root of the problem.
I know that many hackers here on slashdot, be they white hat or black, live under the constant threat of incarceration and all the ass-raping and upheaval of personal life that would entail, merely for being suspected or accused of wrongdoing.
Why don't the extremely highly paid executives and board memebers, the ones who make these decisions, live under the same fear? Why is there no "crime and punishment" factor involved in this decision making process?
This still does not adequately punish the individuals who made decisions that were tanatmount to murder. Or at least manslaughter.
Those individuals will be financially ruined, yes. But don't you think that some of these individuals deserve jail time? A little quality time with a very large, affectionate inmate who's into long walks on the beach, dry martinis, and bending their smaller, weaker, and prettier cell mates over for a good, rough, buggering three times a day?
Otherwise, forming a corporation and willfully taking someone's life could be a loophole for getting out of a prison sentance or hangman's noose.
Where's the JUSTICE?
Personally, I'd feel more comfortable if they spent more money on safety testing that they did on marketing.
(of course, the safety-test funds should go into a neutral-industry trust fund, which fuels a government or at least, independent university scientist testing organization, or something like Underwriters Laboratories - we can't have safety testing if there is even an appearance of conflict of interest. Say what you will about libertarian philosophy on keeping the government out of the business of private citizens, but the fact remains that bias and conflict of interest would render the whole issue moot - and frequently does today.)
I know what you mean. I totally want to fuck Dot Matrix in Reboot (Third season, in the Elvira costume, none of that first season unibreast crap).
Talk about a totally submissive woman! Write the right macro, and she's your love-slave for ever!
I saw the trailers and I can't for the life of me figure out why in god's name a creature with HUGE fangs, is lugging around an acorn. Don't herbivores have flat teeth? What carnivore, pray tell, eats acorns.
After that, I just couldn't involve myself enough to enjoy the utterly cliched slapstick shamelessly stolen from a thousand Road Runner shorts.
Sorry.
Wow, I liked it.
And the reason I think it's so uber-cool is because it's not brainlessly trying to look like Japanimation (like recent Disney efforts). The French influence is very strong - it almost has that 1970's French comic-book look to it. And as a die-hard Moebius fan, that makes me very happy.
I also like the way they did the CGI. It's very laid back, and it gives the 3d motion a lot of life that would otherwise be missing in hand-drawn animation. But UNLIKE the same attempt in The Iron Giant, it doesn't jump off the screen and smack you in the face with "CGI precision!!!". It retains some semblance of unity. The only problem I had with it was the running scene at the end, there girl running looked a bit stiff and unnatural. There's just something that hand animators do that CGI just can't seem to handle yet, and that's the human form at a gallop.
(in all fairness, I think that Pixar licked that one in Monsters. Hell, they even got the pee-pee dance down!)
What I'm afraid of is when movies like "Antz" do better at the box office than movies like "A Bug's Life".
Then, the era of "garbage CGI" will have truly dawned. Understand that Pixar are geeks. They get into nerdy things like developing the next coolest rendering technology. IIRC, "Gerri's Game" (the short about an old man who gets into a chess game with himself, and loses) was more of a technology demonstration about rendering hair more realistically - a proof of concept for the technology in Monsters Inc.
Us geeks watched Monsters Inc. and wowed over the supremely cool hair rendering, and wondered where they got enough CPU to do it all. While the "unwashed masses" went to go see a piece of crap like Jimmy Neutron, which was, while amusing, - it was technically a peice of crap. In the end, per dollar invested up front in engineering and production quality, I'll bet movies like Jimmy Neutron are going to end up being more profitable in the end. Which sucks.
Which business model do YOU think Hollywood will favor?
I don't know about you, but I think that Elijah Wood sucked ass.
The others were good enough though that it didn't ruin the movie for me.
Don't argue with him. He's right. In fact, you can't use a computer TODAY with Windows ME on it. Except as a paperweight or boat-anchor.
eh? I don't think you've ever had direct experience with people at this level in large software companies. Especially in the non-technical or management roles. They not only CAN be this way, they mostly ARE this way.
I don't doubt it's legitimacy, neither am I 100% convinced either. But my doubts aren't based on the language. They're based on the simple fact that we can't verify the source. On the other hand, I have no idea how Microsoft could think they would possibly benefit from intentionally leaking something like this - unless it was sent out with subtle wording differences to different people, in order to catch the leaker (as Steve Jobs has done at Apple).
you can pop mail ONLY if pop is enabled on the Exchange server.
My organization does not enable pop mail because they see it as a security risk - even though this kind of tracking is easily circumvented (as zillions of other posters have already pointed out).
technically AND ethically limited.
". . . fly into a rage because Microsoft decides that paying attention to customers and giving them what they want for a better price is a good idea."
But you see, that's *NOT* what he's suggesting here. Of course, he's SAYING that's what they're doing (rah rah go team), but then he goes on to instruct his sales force on how to use smoke and mirrors to get customers to decide on Microsoft products (or rather, to root out the loose-cannons in customer organizations that are stealth-installing Linux for small projects, etc.)
This is Microsoft's way of attacking Linux. Investing an $80,000+bonuses salary in a lying-ass-sack-of-shit salesperson is more cost-effective than hiring two QA engineers.
In the end, it does nothing towards giving customers what they want for a better price. Microsoft's new licensing strategy for XP, and the complete lack of any technical improvement over Win2k proves this.
Oh, HE may know that, but his dumb-ass sales force probably doesn't. Sales people in the software industry are dumb as shit. This Exchange tracking feature is a well-known scare-tactic by bad managers everywhere. (bad managers are managers that don't understand how to manage people through tactics other than negativism and intimidation - they do not understand that the best way to manage is team-building).
I'm sure he knows that a determined leaker is going to leak this mail via copy-paste or some other method. I'm also sure he knows that probably 80% of his people are too stupid to try something like that. He's trying to discourage the casual leakers.
This is the "soul" of the whole "copy-protection" philosophy, isn't it? The same philosophy born in Bill Gates' infamous "letter to software hobbyists" back in ancient times.
-
He has a point about how Microsoft *should* be concerned about Linux as a competitor. I know my company is DEEPLY concerned about our competitor's products, and we are doing everything we can to tit-for-tat make our product better than theirs, without getting into the dreaded "checkbox war". What we are NOT doing is instructing our sales force on strategies for dishonestly slandering our competition. If Microsoft falls onto hard times in the future, this guy will have an excellent chance at building a new career as a used-car salesman. He has all the necessary skills.
Urban legend has it that Henry Ford's best friend was killed in a Model T prototype. That incident caused Ford to install safety glass in all of their cars from that point on.
Aren't you glad Henry Ford's best friend was cut to ribbons? I know I am. We need more corporations testing their products on their friends and family!
They made a movie out of it starring some Fonda bimbo. Called it "Silkwood".