Other than that, Liberatarianism looks more like Liberalism than any other ideology
On the surface, libertarianism may look more like liberalism than libertarianism looks like anything else, but libertarianism is as different to liberalism in its consequences as is Marxism to liberalism.
Locke's ideas on limitations on wealth ownership were not dependent on a religious morality. His reasoning was that if a person took more than they needed, they prevented others from being able to take what those other needed, and thus their excess consumption of resources prevented others from having even the opportunity of duplicating the feat. What's more, if you took more than you needed, according to Locke, you were depriving others of their benefit under the social contract he devised.
The fundamental economic tenet of liberalism is that you can only take for yourself to the extent that the taking improves the situation for everybody. If you enclose a small farm, for instance, you can make more productive use of it than you can of an open field, and that means you need less land to support yourself - thus benefitting both yourself, and society as a whole. On the other hand, if you enclose an area much larger than that, you merely take away from others, and it makes no difference if you propose to offer the others a chance to work on that farm in return for the money to buy back the food, or for the food itself, because you are still taking equality of opportunity away from those others, and the trade offered in its place is incapable of substituting, especially when entered into under the duress of being deprived of equal opportunity.
If you have followed this far, you can probably see why I say liberalism has as much in common with Marxism as with libertarianism: both liberalism and Marxism limit property ownership (and contrary to popular belief, Marxism does not seek to abolish all property ownership). Both also look down on any situation in which one person is forced to sell their labour to another.
If you apply the principles of liberalism to a context where resources are just adequate for the population, you effectively get Lockean liberalism. If you apply it to a context where resources are infinite, you effectively get something approaching libertarianism. If you apply the principles of liberalism to a context where resources are scarce, you get something approaching Marxism.
The most fundimental premise of libertarianism is the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle)
Sorry, but that is not something that belongs to libertarianism. The Non-Aggression Principle is a part of social contract theory, and social contract theory has been used to justify most political philosophies, including absolute positivism and extreme totalitarian regimes. In fact at risk of inviting Mike Godwin to the table, absolute positivism was the dominant legal philosophy in Germany between around 1890 and 1945.
Libertarianism agrees with liberalism on most things - including the principle that the State has no right to interfere with the actions of an individual that do not adversely affect another. Where they differ is that liberalism recognises that resources are finite, whereas libertarianism fails to recognise this and thus fails to recognise that taking excessive resources adversely affects others by depriving them of the opportunity to take any resources.
Libertarianism is Liberalism stuck in the 19th century.
Libertarianism is Liberalism with a vital organ removed. According to Locke's liberalism, each person should be allowed to take only what they need - unlimited build-up of wealth in a single individual was seen as unjustifiable. Libertarianism removes this principle, and the result has nothing to do with Liberalism.
One thing that liberalism agrees with Marxism on - it is that concentration of wealth in the few is the ultimate social evil.
Libertarians... assume that private citizens will suddenly, after thousands of years of not giving a fuck, start seriously supporting the poor, etc...
Communism (socialism ?) is designed from the start to support all regardless of the scenario. It is designed for the worst case scenario, it takes care of the poor, of the underprivledged, and the needy. Libertarianism turns a blind eye and assumes these things will disappear.
Actually, Marxism also tends to assume the best of people. Marxist theory states that once there is sufficient machinery for production to keep everybody provided for, then relieved of the risks to survival inherent in the capitalist system, people will be glad to contribute according to their ability and have what they produce distributed according to need.
Marx and Engels actually went as far as to claim that after years of a perfect Marxist system, the State (which is to say law, government, and coercive power) would become irrelevant, and "wither away"
According to Marxism, greed is not a universal attribute of human character, and indeed there have been societies that functioned perfectly well without greed - Australian native society before the European invasion (calling a spade a spade here) being a good example.
On the other hand, in a capitalist system, greed may well seem natural and inevitable. The more assets you can accumulate to yourself, the lower the risk to your own survival. That makes greed an essential survival instinct in that environment. Take away the need to be greedy to survive, and you may take away the greed instinct.
It's not like we don't have a live example of people working to contribute to the community for the benefit of all - take a look at the Open Source movement.
If the public elects somebody deemed by the Electoral College to be a dangerous threat to American democracy, they can give the election to somebody else.
You are an idiot. What part of "he told us" did you not understand when you were writing it? He told us, the/. readership, nothing of the sort. He may have told those who read his book, but that does not fit any reasonable definition of "us" in this context. In the context of your post, it was critical that "us" be inclusive, otherwise you were just being a moronic jerk. Presumably you are one of these 12 year old/. readers I keep hearing about.
The potential implications of this are huge if you extrapolate the development and combine it with the open source philosophy.
In principle you could make a more-or-less general purpose machine that could replicate itself and other machines, given enough raw material. If the software driving it was open source, in principle anybody could become their own manufacturing plant. Have the machine produce other machines that mine raw materials, and you could set it loose in a mineral-rich area and it would replicate enough of itself to start producing whatever you want.
Want to go to Mars? Send a small manufacturing/mining combination machine with instructions to replicate itself and then build a habitable environment. Then we don't need to take the environment with us - we get a lower mission payload.
Hell, with technology that can assemble stuff atom by atom you could produce food.
The implications for society of having what amounts to Star Trek's replicators are massive. You could quite literally eliminate poverty and hunger.
the reason it is permitted is that the High Court has found an implied right to political communication in the Constitution. A federal law banning political spam would be invalid
Like many things legal, it's not that simple. A ban including political spam would probably have survived a constitutional challenge - the Government just didn't want to go there.
The most effective way to punish spamming politicians of course is to vote for somebody else.
And that something, if no documented easment is present, is a common law right-of-way, or a statutory method to create a right of way.
No, absolutely not. Firstly, a "common law right-of-way" is just a non-technical way of referring to an easement. The "something" I was referring to is either some other aspect to what was done that would cause a common law easement to be created, or would result in an equitable right to a common law easement.
The easiest way to create inaccessible land is for the owner of the whole to subdivide and sell everything on the outside while forgetting to reserve an easement in the sale, but it's not the only way.
As for Florida, Florida != The World. Florida is not even equal to the United States, except in the Supreme Court of the United States where Florida > United States.
you cannot buy up every piece of property surrounding someone who won't sell, and then hold the isolated property hostage; you have to provide reasonable accomodation for travel.
Actually, you can. Although there will often be something that causes you to have to honour an easement in favour of the newly inaccessible land, it is possible for the situation to arise where somebody owns all the land surrounding land owned by another and can legally prevent access. This has actually happened before and will no doubt happen again.
Copyrights are actually the one form of property that you can reasonably claim: "Nobody would ever have this if I didn't create it."... The whole idea that ideas have zero marginal cost to reproduce introduces complexities that have been hashed out many times before, so I'll stay away from that one.
This is an illogical juxtaposition. Given that the first comes from Locke's Two Treatises on Government, where Locke argued that the greatest benefit of the property was to be derived by keeping it with its creator, you can't simply ignore the fact that the converse is true for copyright when invoking that argument.
Locke also depended to a large degree on the concept of a social contract. He would have been quite disgusted with the idea that, having created the intellectual property under the legal conditions at the time (a social contract in the small rather than in the large), you could come back and change the terms at precisely the time when the other party (society) would be deriving its quid pro quo.
Firstly, copyright is not strictly a lease, its more a legally enforced priviledge
privilege.
the EU sui genesis Database
Sui generis, meaning category of their own. Sui genesis would be coming into existence of their own will, which outside of Futurama seems unlikely.
the Berne Convention back in 68
Despite the fact that the US only signed on to the Berne Convention in the 80s, it is much older than '68. Try 1886.
I mention these errors because they are fairly glaring errors which tend to diminish the fact that the substance of the message was spot on. Yes, Continental Europe has a different view of copyright to that of Common Law countries like the US.
On the other hand, while copyright is not like a lease, it is like a contract with the people. And when authors originally agreed to the 50 year term (by publishing and then claiming copyright), it is incongruous, to say the least, to come back at the end of the 50 years, having taken all or almost all of your benefit under the original agreement, and say you want more. That is exactly what the pro-extension lobby has done, except they have gotten Congress to do it for them by force.
Now the difference between a contract and a lease is something that only lawyers will normally understand, so to that degree the OP's point was perfectly valid.
Absent the US's cooperation the UN would have no success at all in preventing war... Don't worry if you don't agree now - you'll get the idea when we pull out of that modern League of Nations.
So, how many Chapter VII resolutions are currently outstanding against the USA or Israel?
As long as the USA has the veto, there will never be an authorisation for the UN to use force against either the USA or Israel, although from any objective standpoint a use of force against Israel should have been authorised decades ago. For some reason the USA likes to protect Israel (largely, I suspect, historical reasons that have little modern relevance). Are we starting to understand why a lot of Arabs hate the United States now?
However, there are numerous Security Council resolutions demanding Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, and clearly Israel has not done that.
The no-fly zones were enforced under the authority of the UN resolutions that provided the legal basis for the invasion of Iraq in 1991 that forced Saddam to pull out of Kuwait.
Actually, the no-fly zones were illegal in international law. The authorisation of force under resolution 678 (the Gulf War resolution) was terminated under resolution 687 (the ceasefire resolution). There was no UN authorisation whatsoever to enforce the no-fly zones.
Iraq was perfectly within its legal rights to shoot at aircraft trying to enforce the no-fly zones.
Why is google in question? It should be the employee.
Wow, you managed to generate a lot of really crap replies with this. But yes, if the allegations are true it looks like the employee was at fault here. That is, it looks like the employee has gone and done something very illegal and screwed over both their former employer Google. By the way, this is exactly what happened in the most important software copyright case of all time - Computer Associates v Altai.
Now, forget all the crap you're seeing about the company being liable for the conduct of the employee, that's not as important as something else pretty basic regarding copyright suits.
In a copyright suit, you don't have to have any idea that the code you're using belongs to somebody else. The civil liability is absolute. It arises merely from the fact of copying, not from an intention to copy or negligence. If there has been copying of material without a license, there has been a breach of copyright.
So forget about all this stuff about the employer being liable for the conduct of the employee - it's only tangentially relevant since there would have been lots of copying of this code all around Google's systems by numerous employees.
Now, once copying is established, there is the question of liability. In a copyright suit the plaintiff can go for actual damages to them, or an account of profits (that is, take Google's profits from the breach). If Google has profited from this system already, they lose that profit.
It sucks to be an employer whose employees steal somebody else's code and incorporates it into a product, and the normal thing to do when you discover something like this having happened is to summarily dismiss the employee, and join them in the lawsuit as a second defendant with a cross-claim for deceit. Oh, and stop shipping product until you can replace the tainted code.
If Linus had done enough research he would never have started Linux because FreeBSD did everything he wanted it to do.
Especially the time-travel kernel module in FreeBSD. That was really cool, allowing the operating system to travel back in time to before it was even created so that it could do all those things before Linus started Linux
FreeBSD didn't exist when Linus started Linux. In fact its precursor, 386BSD (not to be confused with BSD/386) started as a separate project at around the same time as (and I believe a couple of months later than) Linux.
Ok, if you want to talk about lies and liars--and imply GW Bush (I assume that's who you are implying?) is a liar--what's an example of a lie he told?
The most outrageous lie I heard from him was when he was addressing the Australian Parliament in September last year and claimed:
Since the liberation of Iraq, we have discovered Saddam's clandestine network of biological laboratories, the design work on prohibited long-range missiles, his elaborate campaign to hide illegal weapons programs.
I couldn't believe my ears at the time. They have found nothing of the sort, and this was just an unbelievably bold lie that I couldn't imagine how he thought he could get away with it.
Of course I could go on about the lie about what the war was really about, but Andrew Wilkie's new book Axis of Deceit pretty much covers it.
Except for the internal extractions--Newbie questions,...
I'm really not sure how you expect me to respond to this. It seems either you're saying that new people shouldn't have the opportunity to ask questions, or that somehow being in an office makes a question from a newbie somehow less intrusive. Either way this seems... unsettling.
non-business discussions,
It's called "socialising", and helps build teamwork. You might try it some time.
discussions about topics that aren't useful to everyone in the group,
Unless it's being done at excess volume, it shouldn't be a problem.
technical arguments that go on and on,
Only a problem when you hire a lot of prima donnas. Prima donnas are bad no matter how talented they may be. Best to fire them ASAP. It might seem like it hurts now, but keeping them will hurt more in the long term.
bad choices in music, etc, etc.
Music shouldn't be on speakers in the office anyway. There are these things called "headphones" that you may have heard of.
There are so many ways for people to collaborate that do not involve being able to yell "hey" across a crowded room
People don't do it that way.
that the "collaboration" argument seems like a rationalization for saving money.
There are so many solutions to the problems you claim exist that your argument sounds more like a rationalisation for being a prima donna.
One office - one person. You need your own creative space where your door can close, because IT people walking around with 2-way radios and electrical contractors in the hall and people from QA babbling in some foreign language and assholes from sales who can only use a phone hands-free with the door open and the general buzz of the coffee area and the spinning up noise that the laser printer makes will all distract you fairly effectively.
All of these can also be dealt with without individual offices by locating programming staff away from these distractions and somewhere that is not "on the way" to anywhere. Preferably with only one entrance guarded by trained attack dogs.
For projects where you only have one coder per project, individual offices are OK, but where you have multiple coders on a project, an open room is much better because the individual offices discourage collaboration. It takes more effort to get up and go to somebody's office, particularly if your own office has become a comfort zone since it means leaving the comfort zone.
That doesn't mean the open room should be like a warehouse, but it should be somewhere that encourages collaboration and teamwork.
Yes [it is trivial] if you want to give spammers outside the reach of the law a very convenient large list of new spam victims and those within the reach of the law an excuse to send spam to everyone not on the list, it's trivial - and very stupid.
You are an idiot. It is trivial to do this in a way that doesn't give them anything of the sort. I hate it when unqualified and incompetent people like you don't know when to shut up.
At least they are smart enough to realize that it is not technically feasible yet.
Implementing a do-not-spam registry is only infeasible if you're a technical imbecile (it's trivial to do - even trivial to do right). Enforcement is another question, but since the USA is the original source of spam, remains the dominant source of spam, and will be obviously the very last place to ban it, arguments about spammers running elsewhere are clearly a bogus excuse used by those ignorant in the state of the law and progress around the world, or worse, those in the government who have been corrupted and bought off by the DMA and their cronies.
Slashdot Mirror
On the surface, libertarianism may look more like liberalism than libertarianism looks like anything else, but libertarianism is as different to liberalism in its consequences as is Marxism to liberalism.
Locke's ideas on limitations on wealth ownership were not dependent on a religious morality. His reasoning was that if a person took more than they needed, they prevented others from being able to take what those other needed, and thus their excess consumption of resources prevented others from having even the opportunity of duplicating the feat. What's more, if you took more than you needed, according to Locke, you were depriving others of their benefit under the social contract he devised.
The fundamental economic tenet of liberalism is that you can only take for yourself to the extent that the taking improves the situation for everybody. If you enclose a small farm, for instance, you can make more productive use of it than you can of an open field, and that means you need less land to support yourself - thus benefitting both yourself, and society as a whole. On the other hand, if you enclose an area much larger than that, you merely take away from others, and it makes no difference if you propose to offer the others a chance to work on that farm in return for the money to buy back the food, or for the food itself, because you are still taking equality of opportunity away from those others, and the trade offered in its place is incapable of substituting, especially when entered into under the duress of being deprived of equal opportunity.
If you have followed this far, you can probably see why I say liberalism has as much in common with Marxism as with libertarianism: both liberalism and Marxism limit property ownership (and contrary to popular belief, Marxism does not seek to abolish all property ownership). Both also look down on any situation in which one person is forced to sell their labour to another.
If you apply the principles of liberalism to a context where resources are just adequate for the population, you effectively get Lockean liberalism. If you apply it to a context where resources are infinite, you effectively get something approaching libertarianism. If you apply the principles of liberalism to a context where resources are scarce, you get something approaching Marxism.
Sorry, but that is not something that belongs to libertarianism. The Non-Aggression Principle is a part of social contract theory, and social contract theory has been used to justify most political philosophies, including absolute positivism and extreme totalitarian regimes. In fact at risk of inviting Mike Godwin to the table, absolute positivism was the dominant legal philosophy in Germany between around 1890 and 1945.
Libertarianism agrees with liberalism on most things - including the principle that the State has no right to interfere with the actions of an individual that do not adversely affect another. Where they differ is that liberalism recognises that resources are finite, whereas libertarianism fails to recognise this and thus fails to recognise that taking excessive resources adversely affects others by depriving them of the opportunity to take any resources.
Libertarianism is Liberalism with a vital organ removed. According to Locke's liberalism, each person should be allowed to take only what they need - unlimited build-up of wealth in a single individual was seen as unjustifiable. Libertarianism removes this principle, and the result has nothing to do with Liberalism.
One thing that liberalism agrees with Marxism on - it is that concentration of wealth in the few is the ultimate social evil.
Communism (socialism ?) is designed from the start to support all regardless of the scenario. It is designed for the worst case scenario, it takes care of the poor, of the underprivledged, and the needy. Libertarianism turns a blind eye and assumes these things will disappear.
Actually, Marxism also tends to assume the best of people. Marxist theory states that once there is sufficient machinery for production to keep everybody provided for, then relieved of the risks to survival inherent in the capitalist system, people will be glad to contribute according to their ability and have what they produce distributed according to need.
Marx and Engels actually went as far as to claim that after years of a perfect Marxist system, the State (which is to say law, government, and coercive power) would become irrelevant, and "wither away"
According to Marxism, greed is not a universal attribute of human character, and indeed there have been societies that functioned perfectly well without greed - Australian native society before the European invasion (calling a spade a spade here) being a good example.
On the other hand, in a capitalist system, greed may well seem natural and inevitable. The more assets you can accumulate to yourself, the lower the risk to your own survival. That makes greed an essential survival instinct in that environment. Take away the need to be greedy to survive, and you may take away the greed instinct.
It's not like we don't have a live example of people working to contribute to the community for the benefit of all - take a look at the Open Source movement.
I think we have identified why American programmers are not valued that highly any more.
So how did Dub-yuh still get chosen in 2000?
You are an idiot. What part of "he told us" did you not understand when you were writing it? He told us, the /. readership, nothing of the sort. He may have told those who read his book, but that does not fit any reasonable definition of "us" in this context. In the context of your post, it was critical that "us" be inclusive, otherwise you were just being a moronic jerk. Presumably you are one of these 12 year old /. readers I keep hearing about.
What I find more amazing is that according to you, he somehow managed to post something to SlashDot before it existed. Very impressive indeed.
In principle you could make a more-or-less general purpose machine that could replicate itself and other machines, given enough raw material. If the software driving it was open source, in principle anybody could become their own manufacturing plant. Have the machine produce other machines that mine raw materials, and you could set it loose in a mineral-rich area and it would replicate enough of itself to start producing whatever you want.
Want to go to Mars? Send a small manufacturing/mining combination machine with instructions to replicate itself and then build a habitable environment. Then we don't need to take the environment with us - we get a lower mission payload.
Hell, with technology that can assemble stuff atom by atom you could produce food.
The implications for society of having what amounts to Star Trek's replicators are massive. You could quite literally eliminate poverty and hunger.
Like many things legal, it's not that simple. A ban including political spam would probably have survived a constitutional challenge - the Government just didn't want to go there.
The most effective way to punish spamming politicians of course is to vote for somebody else.
No, absolutely not. Firstly, a "common law right-of-way" is just a non-technical way of referring to an easement. The "something" I was referring to is either some other aspect to what was done that would cause a common law easement to be created, or would result in an equitable right to a common law easement.
The easiest way to create inaccessible land is for the owner of the whole to subdivide and sell everything on the outside while forgetting to reserve an easement in the sale, but it's not the only way.
As for Florida, Florida != The World. Florida is not even equal to the United States, except in the Supreme Court of the United States where Florida > United States.
Actually, you can. Although there will often be something that causes you to have to honour an easement in favour of the newly inaccessible land, it is possible for the situation to arise where somebody owns all the land surrounding land owned by another and can legally prevent access. This has actually happened before and will no doubt happen again.
This is an illogical juxtaposition. Given that the first comes from Locke's Two Treatises on Government, where Locke argued that the greatest benefit of the property was to be derived by keeping it with its creator, you can't simply ignore the fact that the converse is true for copyright when invoking that argument.
Locke also depended to a large degree on the concept of a social contract. He would have been quite disgusted with the idea that, having created the intellectual property under the legal conditions at the time (a social contract in the small rather than in the large), you could come back and change the terms at precisely the time when the other party (society) would be deriving its quid pro quo.
privilege.
the EU sui genesis DatabaseSui generis, meaning category of their own. Sui genesis would be coming into existence of their own will, which outside of Futurama seems unlikely.
the Berne Convention back in 68
Despite the fact that the US only signed on to the Berne Convention in the 80s, it is much older than '68. Try 1886.
I mention these errors because they are fairly glaring errors which tend to diminish the fact that the substance of the message was spot on. Yes, Continental Europe has a different view of copyright to that of Common Law countries like the US.
On the other hand, while copyright is not like a lease, it is like a contract with the people. And when authors originally agreed to the 50 year term (by publishing and then claiming copyright), it is incongruous, to say the least, to come back at the end of the 50 years, having taken all or almost all of your benefit under the original agreement, and say you want more. That is exactly what the pro-extension lobby has done, except they have gotten Congress to do it for them by force.
Now the difference between a contract and a lease is something that only lawyers will normally understand, so to that degree the OP's point was perfectly valid.
Dubya? Is that you?
As long as the USA has the veto, there will never be an authorisation for the UN to use force against either the USA or Israel, although from any objective standpoint a use of force against Israel should have been authorised decades ago. For some reason the USA likes to protect Israel (largely, I suspect, historical reasons that have little modern relevance). Are we starting to understand why a lot of Arabs hate the United States now?
However, there are numerous Security Council resolutions demanding Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, and clearly Israel has not done that.
Actually, the no-fly zones were illegal in international law. The authorisation of force under resolution 678 (the Gulf War resolution) was terminated under resolution 687 (the ceasefire resolution). There was no UN authorisation whatsoever to enforce the no-fly zones.
Iraq was perfectly within its legal rights to shoot at aircraft trying to enforce the no-fly zones.
Of course when voting you tend to have the choice between Tweedledum and Tweedle-dumber.
Wow, you managed to generate a lot of really crap replies with this. But yes, if the allegations are true it looks like the employee was at fault here. That is, it looks like the employee has gone and done something very illegal and screwed over both their former employer Google. By the way, this is exactly what happened in the most important software copyright case of all time - Computer Associates v Altai.
Now, forget all the crap you're seeing about the company being liable for the conduct of the employee, that's not as important as something else pretty basic regarding copyright suits.
In a copyright suit, you don't have to have any idea that the code you're using belongs to somebody else. The civil liability is absolute. It arises merely from the fact of copying, not from an intention to copy or negligence. If there has been copying of material without a license, there has been a breach of copyright.
So forget about all this stuff about the employer being liable for the conduct of the employee - it's only tangentially relevant since there would have been lots of copying of this code all around Google's systems by numerous employees.
Now, once copying is established, there is the question of liability. In a copyright suit the plaintiff can go for actual damages to them, or an account of profits (that is, take Google's profits from the breach). If Google has profited from this system already, they lose that profit.
It sucks to be an employer whose employees steal somebody else's code and incorporates it into a product, and the normal thing to do when you discover something like this having happened is to summarily dismiss the employee, and join them in the lawsuit as a second defendant with a cross-claim for deceit. Oh, and stop shipping product until you can replace the tainted code.
Especially the time-travel kernel module in FreeBSD. That was really cool, allowing the operating system to travel back in time to before it was even created so that it could do all those things before Linus started Linux
FreeBSD didn't exist when Linus started Linux. In fact its precursor, 386BSD (not to be confused with BSD/386) started as a separate project at around the same time as (and I believe a couple of months later than) Linux.
The most outrageous lie I heard from him was when he was addressing the Australian Parliament in September last year and claimed:
I couldn't believe my ears at the time. They have found nothing of the sort, and this was just an unbelievably bold lie that I couldn't imagine how he thought he could get away with it.Of course I could go on about the lie about what the war was really about, but Andrew Wilkie's new book Axis of Deceit pretty much covers it.
I'm really not sure how you expect me to respond to this. It seems either you're saying that new people shouldn't have the opportunity to ask questions, or that somehow being in an office makes a question from a newbie somehow less intrusive. Either way this seems... unsettling.
non-business discussions,
It's called "socialising", and helps build teamwork. You might try it some time.
discussions about topics that aren't useful to everyone in the group,
Unless it's being done at excess volume, it shouldn't be a problem.
technical arguments that go on and on,
Only a problem when you hire a lot of prima donnas. Prima donnas are bad no matter how talented they may be. Best to fire them ASAP. It might seem like it hurts now, but keeping them will hurt more in the long term.
bad choices in music, etc, etc.
Music shouldn't be on speakers in the office anyway. There are these things called "headphones" that you may have heard of.
There are so many ways for people to collaborate that do not involve being able to yell "hey" across a crowded room
People don't do it that way.
that the "collaboration" argument seems like a rationalization for saving money.
There are so many solutions to the problems you claim exist that your argument sounds more like a rationalisation for being a prima donna.
All of these can also be dealt with without individual offices by locating programming staff away from these distractions and somewhere that is not "on the way" to anywhere. Preferably with only one entrance guarded by trained attack dogs.
For projects where you only have one coder per project, individual offices are OK, but where you have multiple coders on a project, an open room is much better because the individual offices discourage collaboration. It takes more effort to get up and go to somebody's office, particularly if your own office has become a comfort zone since it means leaving the comfort zone.
That doesn't mean the open room should be like a warehouse, but it should be somewhere that encourages collaboration and teamwork.
You are an idiot. It is trivial to do this in a way that doesn't give them anything of the sort. I hate it when unqualified and incompetent people like you don't know when to shut up.
Implementing a do-not-spam registry is only infeasible if you're a technical imbecile (it's trivial to do - even trivial to do right). Enforcement is another question, but since the USA is the original source of spam, remains the dominant source of spam, and will be obviously the very last place to ban it, arguments about spammers running elsewhere are clearly a bogus excuse used by those ignorant in the state of the law and progress around the world, or worse, those in the government who have been corrupted and bought off by the DMA and their cronies.