If on opening release nobody bought a game I made and a million people pirated it. I'd call it a resounding success. That kind of attention WILL turn in to sales at some point.
Why? Why would nobody buy the first game but suddenly decide to buy the second one? Why wouldn't they just keep pirating that game, and the next one, and the next one?
Also if you do something as a commercial venture - i.e. it's not just a PR stunt or promo, but you do actually want to get paid for it - and consider getting paid $0 a "resounding success," you may wish to get a refund from wherever you learned about business. Unless you paid them $0 and they considered that a success.
There is no reason to think even one pirated copy represents a copy that would ever have been purchased. They do all represent free advertising though.
The point of advertising is to get people to buy something. Free advertising that gets more people to pirate your game is actually not good. How does that benefit the game maker? Or is the thinking here that someone will say to their friends, "hey, I downloaded this game for free and it's awesome. But you should go pay for it"?
And there's nothing that makes it objectively bad, either.
The "right thing" is of course subjective, so whether it's good or bad will be an individual call. I'm basing my evaluation off the "golden rule" of "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you." On that count, I can honestly say that if I were the one making this game and setting a price for it, I would want people to pay me for it if they use it. So in my book, using it without paying what the creator asked for it is bad.
I say this as someone who downloaded more than my share of music, games etc. in my penurious post-college days. I did that a lot because I wanted to and I could, but I never tried to convince myself it was a "good" thing I was doing. Now that I have more money, I do try to pay for things even if I could get them for free because I think of it as the "right thing to do." Your mileage may vary.
And what % of the 3130 people that pirated it actually would have bought a legit copy?
Why is this meaningful? If I sneak into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying, it doesn't make it OK just because I would never have paid to see it. Sure my watching it doesn't "cost" the theater anything - I'm not really lost revenue for them - but that still doesn't legitimize my doing something for free that other people are paying for and in effect subsidizing.
You can persuasively argue that piracy by people who wouldn't pay for a product doesn't translate to lost revenue. You can't persuasively argue that it's "the right thing" to do, though.
business users are a much better prospect than consumers
Unfortunately not so much anymore. That is/was BlackBerry's whole problem. Five years ago, smartphones were purely business tools, and "BlackBerry" was a synonym for "smartphone." But after the iPhone arrived, consumers started buying smartphones. Now, not only is the consumer smartphone market bigger than the business market, BYOD behavior is pushing some businesses to accept the user's choice of devices - which is almost invariably not a BlackBerry.
BlackBerry's current woes all result from a classic strategic mistake - they kept building products to address their core market, then somebody went and changed the market dynamics on them. I remember reading an interview with a RIM engineer about how they laughed when the iPhone was launched. They said "this thing doesn't have a keyboard, battery life isn't great, there's no corporate administration capability built in... who will ever buy it?" They only realized belatedly that the dynamics had changed a couple years later, and then discovered that they were very poorly positioned to meet the new market's needs.
So we vote for science now? Whatever is most popular gets to be true?
Not about what is true, about what things are named. Scientific truth is objective, names are not. Is it "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" or "North Korea?" "Denali" or "Mount McKinley?" "Strategic Defense Initiative" or "Star Wars?" "Gravina Island Bridge" or "Bridge to Nowhere?"
The moral of the story is that a thing is called what people want to call it. Even if your name is the "official" one, it doesn't matter much if everybody else calls it something else.
How long before a talented bunch of individuals are capable of making high quality movies without the industries backing.
Occasionally, a talented amateur will strike gold and make a really good film on no budget (remember "Clerks?") But for every "talented bunch of individuals" that does that, there are literally thousands who completely SUCK. And not in a good way.
If people off the street who wanted to make movies could do it well, everyone would just watch YouTube all the time and nobody would ever go to the movies. And yet, somehow, I plan to pay money to see "Star Trek Into Darkess" in a few weeks when I could have been watching "Overly Attentive Girlfriend" for free. The movie and TV industries have a lot of D-Bag executives, but the working professionals there really do actually know how to do things like write, act, film and edit. Sometimes amateurs do strike gold but the signal to noise ratio is just way too low compared to even the crappy movie industry we have today.
I'm as interested in seeing the "open source" ethos extend into entertainment as anyone else (love me some FreeCiv!) But let's not kid ourselves that certain industries like games or TV/movies (where more "code review"/cooks in the kitchen generally means a worse product rather than better e.g. a movie with 150 scriptwriters) will ever be produced in high quality and quantity by the same distributed peer review/input model that works for F/OSS. If it were, then TuxRacer and fanfic would have completely consumer the professional media industry by now.
pretty much, we need to dismantle some95% of all federal agencies. All they do is cover what state agnencies do.
Will 50 state NASAs be building 50 individual Mars rovers? Perhaps 50 NIHs and CDCs will cure diseases faster. I can't wait for the West Virginia Department of Energy to declare "let's build coal-burning cars!" while the California DoE outlaws coal alltogether. Wait until the Texas NSA and South Carolina CIA decide that spying on all those liberals in New York is the real mission, and the New Hampshire FCC decides that all cellphones should be made out of maple syrup-based transistors.
On second thought, maybe it isn't so bad. The Alabama Army, the Oklahoma Navy and the Kentucky Marines can go fight our next war and show that all those Federal subsidies of years past were worth it.
If there is a pinch in the economy and they're forced to sell services below cost, they're going to sell the most desirable services they can
That's exactly what the US Postal Service tried to do, run itself like a business by shutting down underused post offices and stopping Saturday delivery. Same with Amtrak, which wanted to cut unprofitable routes and focus on just the high-use, profitable Eastern Seaboard routes. In both cases, politicians wouldn't let them do it because someone's pork barrel was at risk.
The unfortunate moral of the story is that government agencies can't run themselves like businesses because their bosses - the elected politicians - will sabotage those efforts any time it is in their political interests to do so. You can't run an organization like a for-profit corporation and a non-profit public service at the same time. The two missions are fundamentally at odds.
(In an interesting bit of irony, this was the DoJ's rationale in pursuing the breakup of Ma Bell back in the day - you shouldn't have regulated interests like like local phone service [i.e. an entitlement] being subsidized by unregulated services like long distance [i.e. a profit venture]. Read The Deal of the Century for the full story, it's fascinating.)
Unless the government is willing to declare certain parts of itself off-limits to Congressional mandates and able to operate themselves like a for-profit corporation, it should abandon any ideas about judging them that way. Government at its heart is about providing services that need to be collectively funded because they simply can't be profitable, but are in the common good. I hate to sound like a Republican here but it makes sense that the parts that need to operate like a business should be cut loose to make a profit, and the rest should just be declared entitlements and treated as such.
Closed source programs can contain anything inside and be unfit for consumption. The only way you can know that is by opening them.
Did you read every line of source code to OpenOffice before you used it the first time? How about Firefox or Chrome? Have you scrubbed the change logs on each Linux kernel's source update before compiling it?
No?
Neither did I, nor does anyone else. Even the developers of most complex software projects can't find the bugs or issues without multiple code reviews, for frack's sake. So please stop using this line of argument, it make us all look silly to imply that F/OSS advocates say our software is superior because my grandmother who calls computers "internets" can check the source code of her software for QA.
I might, though, go so far as to argue that most shareholders "do it" for almost nothing: they risk only financial loss, but have no responsibility for the activities of their company. Have shareholders ever been held responsible for the actions of the company they "own"?
I think you - and probably most Slashdotters - misunderstand the whole purpose of corporations as compared to partnerships or proprietorships. This is a gross oversimplification, and I'm only familiar with US company structures, but here's the real short version:
Companies can take many forms, but the most common are sole proprietorships, partnerships (regular or limited liability, etc.) or corporations. In a sole proprietorship or partnership, the shareholders are legally responsible for the actions of the company (to varying degrees). If your sole proprietorship/partnership violates the law or racks up huge debts, guess who they're coming after personally? You. That's why these company structures are only suitable when there is just a small group of owners who are all involved in the running of the business and can thus accept the risk of being responsible for it.
If you want lots and lots (thousands or millions) of people to buy stock in your company (thereby funding it through their purchase in your IPO), that's not going to happen if they're all individually responsible for the actions of the corporation. For example, it makes no sense for a little old lady whose retirement fund holds shares in BP to be held responsible for the failure of their GoM drilling rigs. So you create a "corporation" which has the legal fiction of personhood that is separate from the shareholders. So if the corporation violates laws or goes down in flames owing big piles of cash, you can go after the executives and/or give the "death sentence" to the corporation (e.g. the Bell System antitrust breakup, Chapter 7 bankruptcy, etc.) but you can't hold the shareholders responsible. Note though that this isn't 100% true - courts can "pierce the corporate veil" if you have a corporation that is being run like an individual's fiefdom with no oversight, and hold the individuals liable as well like it was a sole proprietorship or partnership.
The above explanation is way, WAY oversimplified but I can't think of any way to explain it in a detailed fashion with a car analogy.
Jebus, people. Is it really so impossible that a nerdy hacker person who made a website that you like did some cracking that was against the law? Even leaving the Assange stuff aside, I remember how Slashdotters were continuing to argue that Hans Reiser was innocent, even after it was pretty incontrovertibly established that it was obvious he had killed his wife. If OJ Simpson had written Emacs instead of playing football, Slashdotters would still be defending him.
For a group of people that espouses to value critical thinking so highly, Slashdotters as a group seem to be rife with confirmation bias and a predilection for conspiracy theories. Sometimes, people you want to like do things that are wrong - even criminal. And there doesn't always have to be some big conspiracy behind it.
I'm betting a bunch of the long-term employees were fired, as they were the most expensive... a few years down the road will be really bad for them.
Pro Tip: the employees who have been at your company the longest are not necessarily your best
.
I think the value of long-term employees often depends very heavily on your corporate culture. In the startups (or startup culture) businesses I have worked at, the longest-tenured employees have been the most valuable due to their tribal knowledge. In older, more bureaucratic companies where I have worked, the long-timers are usually the biggest obstacle to getting things done. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I wonder which category of corporate culture Yahoo! fits into?
Precisely. Public safety authorities in the US know they would cause themselves much more harm than good by shutting down the cell network, even if they could. They themselves use it (many have Wireless Priority Service to get priority access to the next available voice channel on the local tower). People calling 911 need it. EMTs and ambulances often use patient monitoring gear that sends telemetry data over the cellular network. You're screwing up a lot more things than you're fixing if you want to shut down the network.
It's a different story in some other countries where bombing is much more frequent than in the US (and where the government also often owns or has direct control over the telecoms)... network shutdown is actively used there in some cases. But anytime you hear something about the cops or authorities shutting down cell service in the US, don't believe it.
We need a college ged or some kind badges system... The cost of college is killing us
Agreed on the four-year college/university front, but community college is still pretty inexpensive. If you're applying for jobs where community college is not good enough (i.e. they want a university degree), then no "college GED" or equivalent would ever be enough for them. That's because they are using which college you went to as a lazy substitute for figuring out how smart you are, or at least viewing your four-year university degree as some form of proof that you can function for some period of time away from your parents without washing out, landing in rehab or otherwise proving yourself a potential job liability.
The last straw was when an English teacher dedicated her whole damned class for giving a lecture on "Idolaters and Sodomites"
Wait, WHAT? It's sadly common to be persecuted for being gay in high school, but you say a public school teacher taught a class excoriating one of your children as an idolater for being Catholic? I'm not doubting you, but this just sounds a little too over the top to be true in my experience. Were there really no other Catholics in the entire school who were offended by this? Catholics are - even if not locally - a nationally pretty well connected bunch politically and I can't imagine something like this not being a cause for raising a stink at a state diocese level and a big political hullabaloo that would cost the offenders their jobs.
Where was this? When was this? You should at least be able to disclose that in the interest of making sure no Slashdotters ever make the mistake of moving there.
Why doesn't Buran count? It was a monumental achievement in its own right.
That's true - it was a technical success. I only think of it as a failure from a program perspective because for all the time, money and effort that went into it, it never accomplished its primary goal of a sustainable manned mission program. The STS was arguably a failure as well when considered against its original program goals too, but it did get at least as far as ~100 manned missions (with two terrible failures) with some significant accomplishments, and the collateral benefit of inspiring a whole lot of kids like me in the '80s to think that space was cool.
The USSR was, for lack of more appropriate descriptor, the swinging dick of technology and science
Not quite. The Soviets pwned the rest of the world from the beginning of the Space Race through the mid/late '60s. But after that, the US threw more and more money at it until it won hands down. Viz. the Apollo program and space shuttle program, which the USSR couldn't match. (The Buran and exploding rockets don't count.)
Elsewhere, the Soviets stayed strong competitors to the West in science and technology up into the '70s but then they ran into an area of tech that they just couldn't compete in: computers. The Soviet economy had prioritized guns over butter for decades, so computing research went into big iron and military needs. Once the Western free markets began to realize economies in scale on microcomputers, the Soviets had no mechanism to match it and they were left in the dust. There's a lot of great anecdotes about this in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dead Hand.
Fair question. When I work with Excel spreadsheets, much or most of my time is spent doing things that involve "right-click" menus or menu options from the Ribbon. The right-click stuff could be easily enough emulated with a contextual press, but most tablet apps don't have a menu bar and I have a hard time seeing how to make activities like advanced formatting, data filtering, sorting and grouping/ungrouping easy to do on a tablet. Even if it were easy, I still can't see it being as easy as it is with a mouse.
Kinda like my experience with some games on a tablet. I got Dead Space for the iPad, and I think they did a great job of making that control scheme usable on a touchscreen. But it's still not nearly as nice as it is with a keyboard and mouse - so I went back to playing those games on a PC and never played the iPad game more than once or twice. (I also had the same experience with GTA: Chinatown Wars on the iPad.) So for me, I guess I'm just stuck in the idea that some things on a tablet can be workable on a tablet but I'll always prefer them with a WiMP GUI.
I don't care as much about the cloud aspect - although I'm sure most large companies will. The issue for me is that I simply can't imagine doing a presentation or a spreadsheet on my tablet and not having it be a painful experience. Writing long e-mails on an iPad is already no fun; a document with formatting and tables seems practically like an exercise in masochism.
I can read Office documents on my iPad already. I still view it (other than short e-mails) as a content consumption device, not a content creation device... even if it had a snap-on keyboard. So I just don't get why the presence of an office suite on a tablet/mobile device is a big deal. Your mileage may vary.
Do any of the idiots in the movie/music industry that get residuals take responsibility for the crap that they produce?
Yes, they do. If nobody buys your music or watches your TV show, no residuals or royalties for you.
If you're a programmer who wants the equivalent of royalties or a cut of gross or net receipts like an actor or musician gets, you're absolutely free to do that. Write your own mobile or desktop app, sell it and you're getting paid for every copy. Of course, that means you take the risk too. That's how it works.
But what if China actually develops the infrastructure to reach the Moon, pretty much at will, and then decides missile bases would be a good idea?
EPIC FAIL BAD IDEA!
Distance ICBMs need to travel from China to strike the US: ~12,000 miles. Distance IPBMs need to travel from moon to strike the US: ~230,000 miles. Most optimistic estimate I have seen of the cost on lifting mass from Earth to the moon with new launcher systems: $2400 per kg. Weight of one US LGM-30 Minuteman missile: 35,000 kg (but let's assume a missile launched fro the moon would need to only weigh 15,000 kg.) Weight of the materials for a launchpad on the moon and the materials needed for humans or robots to assemble them there: let's say 1,000,000 kg. Most optimistic cost for China to put 10 of these missiles + a launch pad on the moon so that they can take 20 x as long to reach the US as if they had been launched from China: $2.7B excluding the costs of developing, testing and maintaining the system which would likely be at least an order of magnitude greater.
If the US really considers China a strategic threat, we can only hope this would be the kind of astonishing boondoggle they would waste their money on.
I'm terribly intolerant of being questioned, felt up, irradiated, or justifying my presence and/or my travel plans... I've not flown since before 9/11/01, and probably won't again.
So you haven't actually been through airport security, but you have avoided air travel for the last 12 years based on the horror stories you read online or second hand reports?
I fly 20 or 30 times a year, domestically in the US and internationally. Never once have I been questioned about my travel plans when flying domestically, and EVERY country in the world asks you about your travel plans when you go through customs internationally. (Try flying to/from Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv sometime for the ultimate "please justify your presence here" experience.) I have never been groped in hundreds of trips through airport security, nor have I considered myself to be "irradiated" any worse than I was going to get from spending several hours at 40,000 feet.
Look, I don't like the TSA security procedures... trust me, frequent flyers who have to put up with them all the time hate them more than anyone else. It's certainly your right not to fly. But... seriously... it's really not as bad as you (and apparently a lot of other Slashdotters who avoid the US or air travel all together) seem to think.
When's the last time you ever called an admin to thank them for fixing something?
Even if you did, the helpdesk wouldn't even make a note of it, forget about communicate the gratitude to those deserving of it.
I work for a large evil soulless multinational megacorporation. Every time I have an interaction with our IT helpdesk (some of which are outsourced overseas, some of which are domestic), I am prompted via e-mail repeatedly until I fill out a form associated with my specific case ID describing how my interaction was with my IT rep(s), if my problem was solved, was the IT person helpful, etc. I don't know how it is at smaller companies, but I can at least tell you that in my company, every IT interaction receives some kind of rating - good or bad - and that's a powerful incentive for the company to reward its IT management, or fire them.
Slashdot Mirror
If on opening release nobody bought a game I made and a million people pirated it. I'd call it a resounding success. That kind of attention WILL turn in to sales at some point.
Why? Why would nobody buy the first game but suddenly decide to buy the second one? Why wouldn't they just keep pirating that game, and the next one, and the next one?
Also if you do something as a commercial venture - i.e. it's not just a PR stunt or promo, but you do actually want to get paid for it - and consider getting paid $0 a "resounding success," you may wish to get a refund from wherever you learned about business. Unless you paid them $0 and they considered that a success.
There is no reason to think even one pirated copy represents a copy that would ever have been purchased. They do all represent free advertising though.
The point of advertising is to get people to buy something. Free advertising that gets more people to pirate your game is actually not good. How does that benefit the game maker? Or is the thinking here that someone will say to their friends, "hey, I downloaded this game for free and it's awesome. But you should go pay for it"?
And there's nothing that makes it objectively bad, either.
The "right thing" is of course subjective, so whether it's good or bad will be an individual call. I'm basing my evaluation off the "golden rule" of "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you." On that count, I can honestly say that if I were the one making this game and setting a price for it, I would want people to pay me for it if they use it. So in my book, using it without paying what the creator asked for it is bad.
I say this as someone who downloaded more than my share of music, games etc. in my penurious post-college days. I did that a lot because I wanted to and I could, but I never tried to convince myself it was a "good" thing I was doing. Now that I have more money, I do try to pay for things even if I could get them for free because I think of it as the "right thing to do." Your mileage may vary.
And what % of the 3130 people that pirated it actually would have bought a legit copy?
Why is this meaningful? If I sneak into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying, it doesn't make it OK just because I would never have paid to see it. Sure my watching it doesn't "cost" the theater anything - I'm not really lost revenue for them - but that still doesn't legitimize my doing something for free that other people are paying for and in effect subsidizing.
You can persuasively argue that piracy by people who wouldn't pay for a product doesn't translate to lost revenue. You can't persuasively argue that it's "the right thing" to do, though.
business users are a much better prospect than consumers
Unfortunately not so much anymore. That is/was BlackBerry's whole problem. Five years ago, smartphones were purely business tools, and "BlackBerry" was a synonym for "smartphone." But after the iPhone arrived, consumers started buying smartphones. Now, not only is the consumer smartphone market bigger than the business market, BYOD behavior is pushing some businesses to accept the user's choice of devices - which is almost invariably not a BlackBerry.
BlackBerry's current woes all result from a classic strategic mistake - they kept building products to address their core market, then somebody went and changed the market dynamics on them. I remember reading an interview with a RIM engineer about how they laughed when the iPhone was launched. They said "this thing doesn't have a keyboard, battery life isn't great, there's no corporate administration capability built in... who will ever buy it?" They only realized belatedly that the dynamics had changed a couple years later, and then discovered that they were very poorly positioned to meet the new market's needs.
So we vote for science now? Whatever is most popular gets to be true?
Not about what is true, about what things are named. Scientific truth is objective, names are not. Is it "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" or "North Korea?" "Denali" or "Mount McKinley?" "Strategic Defense Initiative" or "Star Wars?" "Gravina Island Bridge" or "Bridge to Nowhere?"
The moral of the story is that a thing is called what people want to call it. Even if your name is the "official" one, it doesn't matter much if everybody else calls it something else.
How long before a talented bunch of individuals are capable of making high quality movies without the industries backing.
Occasionally, a talented amateur will strike gold and make a really good film on no budget (remember "Clerks?") But for every "talented bunch of individuals" that does that, there are literally thousands who completely SUCK. And not in a good way.
If people off the street who wanted to make movies could do it well, everyone would just watch YouTube all the time and nobody would ever go to the movies. And yet, somehow, I plan to pay money to see "Star Trek Into Darkess" in a few weeks when I could have been watching "Overly Attentive Girlfriend" for free. The movie and TV industries have a lot of D-Bag executives, but the working professionals there really do actually know how to do things like write, act, film and edit. Sometimes amateurs do strike gold but the signal to noise ratio is just way too low compared to even the crappy movie industry we have today.
I'm as interested in seeing the "open source" ethos extend into entertainment as anyone else (love me some FreeCiv!) But let's not kid ourselves that certain industries like games or TV/movies (where more "code review"/cooks in the kitchen generally means a worse product rather than better e.g. a movie with 150 scriptwriters) will ever be produced in high quality and quantity by the same distributed peer review/input model that works for F/OSS. If it were, then TuxRacer and fanfic would have completely consumer the professional media industry by now.
pretty much, we need to dismantle some95% of all federal agencies. All they do is cover what state agnencies do.
Will 50 state NASAs be building 50 individual Mars rovers? Perhaps 50 NIHs and CDCs will cure diseases faster. I can't wait for the West Virginia Department of Energy to declare "let's build coal-burning cars!" while the California DoE outlaws coal alltogether. Wait until the Texas NSA and South Carolina CIA decide that spying on all those liberals in New York is the real mission, and the New Hampshire FCC decides that all cellphones should be made out of maple syrup-based transistors.
On second thought, maybe it isn't so bad. The Alabama Army, the Oklahoma Navy and the Kentucky Marines can go fight our next war and show that all those Federal subsidies of years past were worth it.
If there is a pinch in the economy and they're forced to sell services below cost, they're going to sell the most desirable services they can
That's exactly what the US Postal Service tried to do, run itself like a business by shutting down underused post offices and stopping Saturday delivery. Same with Amtrak, which wanted to cut unprofitable routes and focus on just the high-use, profitable Eastern Seaboard routes. In both cases, politicians wouldn't let them do it because someone's pork barrel was at risk.
The unfortunate moral of the story is that government agencies can't run themselves like businesses because their bosses - the elected politicians - will sabotage those efforts any time it is in their political interests to do so. You can't run an organization like a for-profit corporation and a non-profit public service at the same time. The two missions are fundamentally at odds.
(In an interesting bit of irony, this was the DoJ's rationale in pursuing the breakup of Ma Bell back in the day - you shouldn't have regulated interests like like local phone service [i.e. an entitlement] being subsidized by unregulated services like long distance [i.e. a profit venture]. Read The Deal of the Century for the full story, it's fascinating.)
Unless the government is willing to declare certain parts of itself off-limits to Congressional mandates and able to operate themselves like a for-profit corporation, it should abandon any ideas about judging them that way. Government at its heart is about providing services that need to be collectively funded because they simply can't be profitable, but are in the common good. I hate to sound like a Republican here but it makes sense that the parts that need to operate like a business should be cut loose to make a profit, and the rest should just be declared entitlements and treated as such.
Closed source programs can contain anything inside and be unfit for consumption. The only way you can know that is by opening them.
Did you read every line of source code to OpenOffice before you used it the first time? How about Firefox or Chrome? Have you scrubbed the change logs on each Linux kernel's source update before compiling it?
No?
Neither did I, nor does anyone else. Even the developers of most complex software projects can't find the bugs or issues without multiple code reviews, for frack's sake. So please stop using this line of argument, it make us all look silly to imply that F/OSS advocates say our software is superior because my grandmother who calls computers "internets" can check the source code of her software for QA.
I might, though, go so far as to argue that most shareholders "do it" for almost nothing: they risk only financial loss, but have no responsibility for the activities of their company. Have shareholders ever been held responsible for the actions of the company they "own"?
I think you - and probably most Slashdotters - misunderstand the whole purpose of corporations as compared to partnerships or proprietorships. This is a gross oversimplification, and I'm only familiar with US company structures, but here's the real short version:
Companies can take many forms, but the most common are sole proprietorships, partnerships (regular or limited liability, etc.) or corporations. In a sole proprietorship or partnership, the shareholders are legally responsible for the actions of the company (to varying degrees). If your sole proprietorship/partnership violates the law or racks up huge debts, guess who they're coming after personally? You. That's why these company structures are only suitable when there is just a small group of owners who are all involved in the running of the business and can thus accept the risk of being responsible for it.
If you want lots and lots (thousands or millions) of people to buy stock in your company (thereby funding it through their purchase in your IPO), that's not going to happen if they're all individually responsible for the actions of the corporation. For example, it makes no sense for a little old lady whose retirement fund holds shares in BP to be held responsible for the failure of their GoM drilling rigs. So you create a "corporation" which has the legal fiction of personhood that is separate from the shareholders. So if the corporation violates laws or goes down in flames owing big piles of cash, you can go after the executives and/or give the "death sentence" to the corporation (e.g. the Bell System antitrust breakup, Chapter 7 bankruptcy, etc.) but you can't hold the shareholders responsible. Note though that this isn't 100% true - courts can "pierce the corporate veil" if you have a corporation that is being run like an individual's fiefdom with no oversight, and hold the individuals liable as well like it was a sole proprietorship or partnership.
The above explanation is way, WAY oversimplified but I can't think of any way to explain it in a detailed fashion with a car analogy.
Jebus, people. Is it really so impossible that a nerdy hacker person who made a website that you like did some cracking that was against the law? Even leaving the Assange stuff aside, I remember how Slashdotters were continuing to argue that Hans Reiser was innocent, even after it was pretty incontrovertibly established that it was obvious he had killed his wife. If OJ Simpson had written Emacs instead of playing football, Slashdotters would still be defending him.
For a group of people that espouses to value critical thinking so highly, Slashdotters as a group seem to be rife with confirmation bias and a predilection for conspiracy theories. Sometimes, people you want to like do things that are wrong - even criminal. And there doesn't always have to be some big conspiracy behind it.
I'm betting a bunch of the long-term employees were fired, as they were the most expensive ... a few years down the road will be really bad for them.
Pro Tip: the employees who have been at your company the longest are not necessarily your best
.
I think the value of long-term employees often depends very heavily on your corporate culture. In the startups (or startup culture) businesses I have worked at, the longest-tenured employees have been the most valuable due to their tribal knowledge. In older, more bureaucratic companies where I have worked, the long-timers are usually the biggest obstacle to getting things done. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I wonder which category of corporate culture Yahoo! fits into?
And why should they?
Precisely. Public safety authorities in the US know they would cause themselves much more harm than good by shutting down the cell network, even if they could. They themselves use it (many have Wireless Priority Service to get priority access to the next available voice channel on the local tower). People calling 911 need it. EMTs and ambulances often use patient monitoring gear that sends telemetry data over the cellular network. You're screwing up a lot more things than you're fixing if you want to shut down the network.
It's a different story in some other countries where bombing is much more frequent than in the US (and where the government also often owns or has direct control over the telecoms)... network shutdown is actively used there in some cases. But anytime you hear something about the cops or authorities shutting down cell service in the US, don't believe it.
We need a college ged or some kind badges system ... The cost of college is killing us
Agreed on the four-year college/university front, but community college is still pretty inexpensive. If you're applying for jobs where community college is not good enough (i.e. they want a university degree), then no "college GED" or equivalent would ever be enough for them. That's because they are using which college you went to as a lazy substitute for figuring out how smart you are, or at least viewing your four-year university degree as some form of proof that you can function for some period of time away from your parents without washing out, landing in rehab or otherwise proving yourself a potential job liability.
The last straw was when an English teacher dedicated her whole damned class for giving a lecture on "Idolaters and Sodomites"
Wait, WHAT? It's sadly common to be persecuted for being gay in high school, but you say a public school teacher taught a class excoriating one of your children as an idolater for being Catholic? I'm not doubting you, but this just sounds a little too over the top to be true in my experience. Were there really no other Catholics in the entire school who were offended by this? Catholics are - even if not locally - a nationally pretty well connected bunch politically and I can't imagine something like this not being a cause for raising a stink at a state diocese level and a big political hullabaloo that would cost the offenders their jobs.
Where was this? When was this? You should at least be able to disclose that in the interest of making sure no Slashdotters ever make the mistake of moving there.
I see what you did there.
Why doesn't Buran count? It was a monumental achievement in its own right.
That's true - it was a technical success. I only think of it as a failure from a program perspective because for all the time, money and effort that went into it, it never accomplished its primary goal of a sustainable manned mission program. The STS was arguably a failure as well when considered against its original program goals too, but it did get at least as far as ~100 manned missions (with two terrible failures) with some significant accomplishments, and the collateral benefit of inspiring a whole lot of kids like me in the '80s to think that space was cool.
The USSR was, for lack of more appropriate descriptor, the swinging dick of technology and science
Not quite. The Soviets pwned the rest of the world from the beginning of the Space Race through the mid/late '60s. But after that, the US threw more and more money at it until it won hands down. Viz. the Apollo program and space shuttle program, which the USSR couldn't match. (The Buran and exploding rockets don't count.)
Elsewhere, the Soviets stayed strong competitors to the West in science and technology up into the '70s but then they ran into an area of tech that they just couldn't compete in: computers. The Soviet economy had prioritized guns over butter for decades, so computing research went into big iron and military needs. Once the Western free markets began to realize economies in scale on microcomputers, the Soviets had no mechanism to match it and they were left in the dust. There's a lot of great anecdotes about this in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dead Hand.
Which part of it scares you?
Fair question. When I work with Excel spreadsheets, much or most of my time is spent doing things that involve "right-click" menus or menu options from the Ribbon. The right-click stuff could be easily enough emulated with a contextual press, but most tablet apps don't have a menu bar and I have a hard time seeing how to make activities like advanced formatting, data filtering, sorting and grouping/ungrouping easy to do on a tablet. Even if it were easy, I still can't see it being as easy as it is with a mouse.
Kinda like my experience with some games on a tablet. I got Dead Space for the iPad, and I think they did a great job of making that control scheme usable on a touchscreen. But it's still not nearly as nice as it is with a keyboard and mouse - so I went back to playing those games on a PC and never played the iPad game more than once or twice. (I also had the same experience with GTA: Chinatown Wars on the iPad.) So for me, I guess I'm just stuck in the idea that some things on a tablet can be workable on a tablet but I'll always prefer them with a WiMP GUI.
I don't care as much about the cloud aspect - although I'm sure most large companies will. The issue for me is that I simply can't imagine doing a presentation or a spreadsheet on my tablet and not having it be a painful experience. Writing long e-mails on an iPad is already no fun; a document with formatting and tables seems practically like an exercise in masochism.
I can read Office documents on my iPad already. I still view it (other than short e-mails) as a content consumption device, not a content creation device... even if it had a snap-on keyboard. So I just don't get why the presence of an office suite on a tablet/mobile device is a big deal. Your mileage may vary.
Do any of the idiots in the movie/music industry that get residuals take responsibility for the crap that they produce?
Yes, they do. If nobody buys your music or watches your TV show, no residuals or royalties for you.
If you're a programmer who wants the equivalent of royalties or a cut of gross or net receipts like an actor or musician gets, you're absolutely free to do that. Write your own mobile or desktop app, sell it and you're getting paid for every copy. Of course, that means you take the risk too. That's how it works.
But what if China actually develops the infrastructure to reach the Moon, pretty much at will, and then decides missile bases would be a good idea?
EPIC FAIL BAD IDEA!
Distance ICBMs need to travel from China to strike the US: ~12,000 miles. Distance IPBMs need to travel from moon to strike the US: ~230,000 miles. Most optimistic estimate I have seen of the cost on lifting mass from Earth to the moon with new launcher systems: $2400 per kg. Weight of one US LGM-30 Minuteman missile: 35,000 kg (but let's assume a missile launched fro the moon would need to only weigh 15,000 kg.) Weight of the materials for a launchpad on the moon and the materials needed for humans or robots to assemble them there: let's say 1,000,000 kg. Most optimistic cost for China to put 10 of these missiles + a launch pad on the moon so that they can take 20 x as long to reach the US as if they had been launched from China: $2.7B excluding the costs of developing, testing and maintaining the system which would likely be at least an order of magnitude greater.
If the US really considers China a strategic threat, we can only hope this would be the kind of astonishing boondoggle they would waste their money on.
I'm terribly intolerant of being questioned, felt up, irradiated, or justifying my presence and/or my travel plans ... I've not flown since before 9/11/01, and probably won't again.
So you haven't actually been through airport security, but you have avoided air travel for the last 12 years based on the horror stories you read online or second hand reports?
I fly 20 or 30 times a year, domestically in the US and internationally. Never once have I been questioned about my travel plans when flying domestically, and EVERY country in the world asks you about your travel plans when you go through customs internationally. (Try flying to/from Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv sometime for the ultimate "please justify your presence here" experience.) I have never been groped in hundreds of trips through airport security, nor have I considered myself to be "irradiated" any worse than I was going to get from spending several hours at 40,000 feet.
Look, I don't like the TSA security procedures... trust me, frequent flyers who have to put up with them all the time hate them more than anyone else. It's certainly your right not to fly. But ... seriously ... it's really not as bad as you (and apparently a lot of other Slashdotters who avoid the US or air travel all together) seem to think.
When's the last time you ever called an admin to thank them for fixing something? Even if you did, the helpdesk wouldn't even make a note of it, forget about communicate the gratitude to those deserving of it.
I work for a large evil soulless multinational megacorporation. Every time I have an interaction with our IT helpdesk (some of which are outsourced overseas, some of which are domestic), I am prompted via e-mail repeatedly until I fill out a form associated with my specific case ID describing how my interaction was with my IT rep(s), if my problem was solved, was the IT person helpful, etc. I don't know how it is at smaller companies, but I can at least tell you that in my company, every IT interaction receives some kind of rating - good or bad - and that's a powerful incentive for the company to reward its IT management, or fire them.