I think the question is, why would it be "useless" for apps on Android (assuming it was implemented in Linux), if the virtual machine itself is subject to the same capabilities when it tries to do system calls for apps? That would seem to work fine.
Of course, the possibility exists that the AC is full of crap, but I'll defer to someone who might actually know rather than just speculating as I am.
C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all.
I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel.
And, of course, a good concept with an incompatible implementation could never, ever be reimplemented to work on a different operating system or programming language.
You know what, that's too harsh. Let me put it a different way: Why deprive the PC users of an advantage rather than merely disclosing it? There is no reason for a blanket ban on PC users playing against console users. You just identify which kind of device a competing player is using, and if you don't want to play against PC users, don't play against PC users. You can always kick them out of the session (or the developers can provide whoever is hosting/creating the session an option to not let them join).
The console gamer will complain about "balance" --- anything that gives the PC gamer a competitive edge.
Why doesn't the console gamer either hook up a PC to the TV or STFU? It seems silly to complain about an advantage that you can fairly easily claim for yourself.
After all, Nintendo doesn't want to suddenly have games appearing for free, or for 99 cents, on their Wii platform. Not only, those games probably wouldn't take good advantage of their highly specialized hardware, but those games could potentially crowd out the much more expensive other games they have on it.
So instead they would rather see people adopt other platforms in addition to theirs, where users can get 99 cent games, and then see their platform fall into disuse as developers realize they make more money putting their $50 games on all platforms than just some, and then users realize they get all games on the platforms with 99 cent games and abandon the exclusionary platforms?
Stupid exclusionary tactics where you try to screw over your users only works until you have a competitor that doesn't play by the same rules.
The reason I mention "if you want to stick to those phones" is because you have a much greater choice if you just pick up a plan+phone, or prepaid phone, from any provider you please, and use it to make actual calls - keeping your N9/iPhone around for chatting, internetting, etc. on e.g. WiFi networks (your hotel / place you stay, starbucks, mcdonald's, book stores, whatever).
It surprises me that more domestic US users don't do the same thing. It's to the point that you can get second hand Android phones on eBay and elsewhere for $100-$200. (They sometimes have a "bad ESN" meaning the carrier won't activate it for some reason, e.g. the user filed an insurance claim thinking the phone was broken but then someone either realized it wasn't or fixed it and resold it, or because the carriers are just jackasses who refuse to activate used phones etc. But if you're only going to use it on WiFi then what the carrier thinks doesn't much matter.) Then put Cyanogen on it, use it on WiFi and get yourself a cheap flip phone for actual phone calls.
Section 512(c) applies to OSPs [online service providers] that store infringing material. In addition to the two general requirements that OSPs comply with standard technical measures and remove repeat infringers, 512(c) also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and 3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.
I don't see anything about 'common carrier' or 'no editorial control' etc.
I suppose you could argue that if they have some human in there reading every single posting and approving them then they could have trouble with (2) because that might cause them to "be aware of the presence of infringing material" (assuming they didn't remove it when they became aware of it), but nobody is ever going to inspect everything manually anyway because it's prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile I don't see how that applies to, for example, removing unwanted FUD after you already become aware of them by chance or through normal usage, or having an algorithm that deprioritizes materials the algorithm categorizes as undesirable or inflammatory. It isn't removing unwanted material that seems to be the trouble, it's being aware of infringing material and not removing it.
I know people love to whine about how over-priced movies are, and how that justifies your piracy, but seriously, these are two block busters from 2010 for the price of a McDonald's meal. What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
I don't actually "pirate stuff" hardly at all, but do you want the real answer?
The first thing to understand is that different people turn to piracy for different reasons. The one you're ostensibly arguing against is this one. And that is the reason why your argument fails: The problem is not "DVDs should be $10." The problem is that a legitimate copy of a sufficiently recent show or movie is not available. Not for $10, not for $20, not for $50. And by the time it is available on DVD, $20 is no longer an attractive price because you've already seen the content (one way or another) and it frequently isn't worth $20 to buy something old that you've already seen.
But there is an implicit assumption in your argument that bears pointing out: Even if you improve the attractiveness of legitimate offerings, that will never "stop" piracy, because people turn to piracy for different reasons. What it will do is increase revenues, because you do convert the subset of pirates who turn to piracy because of a lack of attractive legitimate offerings, in exactly the same way that iTunes did for music and substantially reduced music piracy.
But it won't stop people who turn to piracy for reasons other than lack of legitimate availability. There is a large subset of pirates who do it because they consider "fuck the MPAA" to be a public service. If you want to convert those people, you have to adopt a strategy that targets them -- like the MPAA publicly (and in actual fact) abandoning its lobbying campaign to enact legislation and treaties that support DRM and impinge civil liberties.
Before this clarification, businesses could and were easily exploiting NFP status to avoid taxes. For example, WalMart could set up a trifling scholarship fund, claim its revenue is intended to further education, and suddenly be free of billions of dollars of income tax obligations.
Right. So? That's kind of the idea. If they were a nonprofit then the billions in "profits" would have no other permissible use than either to expand the business (good for the economy and increases the amount of charity that can be done later) or add securities to the endowment (same) or to actually do the charity work. There would be no shareholders and diverting the money to any private interest would be fraud.
In theory they could keep expanding the company indefinitely and never actually do any charity work, but what would be the point of that? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sit on a huge pile of cash earmarked for charity and never actually do the charity.
You must look at how corrupt and unscrupulous sociopaths could abuse the system to the detriment of others.
Sure, you can get sociopaths who take control of some portion of the nonprofits and try to loot them, but that would violate the corporation's charter and therefore be illegal. And the employees who subsequently lose their jobs and the beneficiaries who subsequently lose their benefits would have good incentive to see that person prosecuted.
In addition to that, we have that problem already. The existing system encourages that problem. Under the current system, the CEO who refuses to engage in de facto collusion with competitors is fired and the CEO who engages in it is given a bonus. Most of the assholes who ran Enron have retired comfortably with their golden parachutes. When the worst case outcome for a proposed alternative system is the existing system, I don't see much to complain about.
I guess my point is, the only way to get real investment is to offer a return for the risk. Greed is the best human motivator.
Sure, but once you have an endowment (which you can get from soliciting donors as all charities do), you can act much like any other company in seeking out talent. There is nothing in human nature that prevents a company from paying executives and engineering talent bonuses based on how much the enterprise grows, regardless of whether it is a nonprofit.
The idea is not just to have a nonprofit engage in commerce to raise money. They can do that by investing whatever endowment they have in for-profit companies. The key is to engage in commerce, charitably. You can offer your services at cost for the poor. You can choose not to screw over your customers. You can refuse to collude with competitors or engage in conscious parallelism. Those things make a company less profitable, but not unprofitable -- and they tend to make the entire industry less profitable, not just the company doing it, because customers who suddenly have a choice to buy from someone who doesn't screw them over will do so and that forces everyone else to stop screwing them over too. And lower (but still positive) profits are another word for increased market efficiency, because getting more for less increases demand which means more economic activity and more jobs.
I'm slowly noticing that in every sector of business you end up with two megacorps, one with a huge market share, the other with a slightly smaller, but nonetheless monolithic, one, and then a couple fringe/niche underdogs. I don't actually know if this is healthy.
Oh, it's not healthy at all. But it's the inevitable result of the set of laws we have right now.
Markets in general tend toward monopoly anyway. The reason you see two major companies instead of one is that that is about the extent of what the antitrust laws will do: They'll generally prevent the biggest company from buying the second biggest, both not prevent the second biggest from buying the third biggest. So the #2 buys the #3 and becomes the new #1. A few years later the new #2 buys the new #3, repeat until duopoly.
On top of that, we have a tax code that favors stock price appreciation to dividends, so companies have a tax incentive to use profits to buy their competitors rather than return it to their shareholders (who might otherwise have reinvested it in smaller rather than larger entities). On top of that, the truly epic amount of money that law firms and investment banks make on large corporate merges and acquisitions causes them to be constantly on the hunt for companies they can convince to buy each other (and then pay them, literally, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to do the paperwork).
So most of the laws tend to accelerate the road to a monopoly, and then the antitrust laws stop it at the penultimate step when there are only two companies left. It's a damn catastrophe and the results are going to end up looking a lot like the results of communism pretty soon (with corporate directors and executives as the unaccountable ruling communist party) unless something changes.
The world would be a better place, probably, if everything turned into a socially oriented non-profit, but doing so would require laws that are pretty disagreeable, and ultimately people do have the right to be greedy as long as their is no direct harm to others.
I'm not advocating getting rid of profit-seeking companies. They have good uses -- like giving investors something to invest in. But that is a far cry from saying that we must or should have an economy which is 99% controlled by for-profit entities. 50% would be quite sufficient.
And there are a lot of small steps that could be taken to fix it without any huge one-time drastic action. For one thing, remove the prohibition on tax exempt nonprofits operating a commercial enterprise as a fundraising mechanism. Then take, say, 1% of the federal budget and use the money to commission several such companies every year in various industries, in the nature of venture capitalism (with small entrepreneurs pitching their ideas and the government funding the best ones), except that instead of being owned by the capitalists or the governments, they would be nonprofits owned by nobody and run by the entrepreneurs (bound by the corporation's charter) who get to implement their big ideas without worrying about where their next meal comes from.
Frankly this corporate cheerleading is getting a little old and one begins to wonder if there isn't something to the rumor that Google pays posters to hang around at geek sites to protect their branding.
So which company is it that pays you to do it then? Should we look for evidence of you being a shill, if we're being so suspicious of people?
Google "Does no evil"
People who claim that Google's motto is "do no evil" instead of "don't be evil" in the face of basically anyone who pays any attention correcting them continuously is either being willfully ignorant or is being paid to be willfully ignorant. Shills prefer "do no evil" because it's an impossible standard: Nobody agrees what evil is. If they work with copyright holders then they're evil MAFIAA censors, if they refuse then they're evil pirate sympathizers wrecking the economy, if they look for middle ground then they're both.
Now let's consider the disregard for facts (typical of shills):
if they weren't they wouldn't have become a fortune 50 company
Apple and Microsoft are in the Fortune 50. Google is number 92 (on the 2011 list).
That's just this post. Do you want to see if anyone is interested in looking through your history for more evidence that someone is paying you to attack Google (like repeated postings of the same talking points), or are you finished trolling?
What they're saying is your company chooses when the ugprades are done and can give employees a heads up.
Only to a very limited extent. When Office 2007 came out, the next thing everybody knew, people from other companies are sending them.docx files they couldn't open. Then you're running around having to install the compatibility pack on everybody's machine, which doesn't actually work properly on a lot of files (and tends to convert formulas into uneditable pictures). The only real solution to that is to go out and pay for Office 2007 and retrain all your users. The fact that you might have a period of time in which to do it (or not, if the compatibility pack's failings are causing immediate problems) is little comfort -- it's an undesired additional cost whether you do it immediately or a year later.
No one's come up with a better system that capitalist republics yet, and the alternatives are all horrible: Marxism, feudalism, etc.
I came up with one once. It looks a lot like capitalism, but not exactly.
If you think about why capitalism works, it's because power has competition. (And when you think about where it fails, it's where power doesn't have competition.) Because where there is competition, efficient companies succeed and inefficient companies fail.
But you can have competition without greed. Suppose you have corporations chartered for purposes other than maximizing shareholder value: For example, if the goal of a corporation is to engage in commercial activity and use the profits to operate soup kitchens and homeless shelters, or to fund basic scientific research, or to break into consolidated markets with high barriers to entry, whether or not doing those things is profit-maximizing. So for example, you have a drug company like Pfizer, but instead of having shareholders who take profits as dividends, they use the profits to subsidize healthcare for the poor.
And I always wondered why no one had ever tried that before. I actually found out the answer last year. They did try that. In the early 20th century. And it worked. And one of the reasons it worked really well was that if you weren't a profit-seeking corporation, you could incorporate as a non-profit and you didn't have to pay taxes, so all the money that a for-profit corporation would have paid in taxes could instead go to either expanding the enterprise or to doing a larger amount of unprofitable charity work. Which made the IRS very unhappy -- if not-for-profit corporations start successfully taking over industries and using the margins to do charity, the government loses out on a lot of tax revenue. So they banned it. They prohibited tax exempt organizations from doing business commercially in order to raise money to do their charity work.
So you can still do it, but you have to organize as a taxable corporation. And then you have no way of raising the initial capital, because investors will want an ownership stake (which makes you a traditional for-profit corporation again) and donors want a tax deduction (which the IRS disallows if you're a commercial enterprise, profit-seeking or otherwise). So those kinds of corporations effectively no longer exist.
But they could if we wanted them to and changed the law.
Where do people come up with this nonsense? They can control the content all the like. But if they do it in a way that is detrimental to their users, people will switch to something else. That is what keeps them from censoring Microsoft and anyone else critical of them, not whatever "'web host' IP protection status" is supposed to mean.
Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't running a FUD campaign against them. (It seems that they are.)
By this logic if there are only too parties running and the Democrat is too moderate for you, you should vote for the Republican (and write the Democrat a letter saying why) to punish the Democrat for not leaning more to the left. Which I suppose is a possible strategy in game theory... but the result is likely to be a series of huge swings from very conservative Republicans to very socialist Democrats as the two extremes both punish any candidate who approaches the middle, rather than a series of moderates who can largely get along with one another and make reasonable compromises.
Hell, if people show up and actually vote for the person they truly believe will do the best job rather than concede their vote will be "thrown away" if they don't vote for one chosen for them, we might see some truly spectacular democracy.
And we might see some truly spectacular fascism.
People envision third parties winning landslides if people would only vote for them, as though that is the only thing stopping literally everyone from agreeing that Your Candidate is the best candidate. But that almost never happens in reality. Unless all the other candidates are a bunch of ugly stupid pedophiles with no money, there is no candidate in a three-or-more-way race that will get 75% of the vote -- because at least one of the other candidates will appeal to a larger voting bloc than that. There are issues where the country is split close to 50-50, so whether your candidate's position is X or not-X, half the voters oppose that position.
But whenever you have a close race, having more than two viable candidates results in epic fail, because the fascist wins with 40% of the vote after the anti-fascist candidates split the remainder.
For instance the democrats are now afraid to give give the green party too much space because of what happened in 2000, and the republicans are similarly letting Ron Paul be a candidate even though they despise the guy, just to avoid the threat of him running for an independent party stealing a possible win..
That is exactly what I am talking about. Ron Paul is not running as a Libertarian, he is running in the Republican primary. Viable would-be Green party candidates can do the same thing in the Democratic primary (when there is one).
There is also another alternative, specifically for presidential elections and elections in districts that lean strongly in one direction: If a third party (e.g. Ralph Nader) runs, they should only run in guaranteed districts. Greens are most viable in 80% Democratic Congressional districts anyway. Or put your name on the ballot for President in California and Massachusetts, but not Florida or Ohio. Then you can show how much support you have, and get yourself in front of a microphone, without changing the outcome of any elections to favor the greater of two evils.
But that isn't a distinction people generally make when they talk about voting for third parties. If you have an election between two major parties that each have a significant chance of winning, voting for a third party is still voting against the major party most like them. If you know the election is going to be a landslide for one candidate, then vote for whoever you want because it isn't going to matter.
OK, let me respond to this from the post you linked:
The more people vote 3rd party- the more people will see it as a legitimate stance- which hopefully one day will lead to more than two parties.
That won't happen unless you change the voting system. If it attempts to happen, you see what you saw in Lincoln's time with the Whigs and the Republicans: The Republicans became a viable third party, then the Whigs immediately died off and their members joined the Republicans. Because everyone who is paying attention realizes that it's better to join forces with whoever is most like you than to split the vote with them. Which won't change unless we change the voting system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the question is, why would it be "useless" for apps on Android (assuming it was implemented in Linux), if the virtual machine itself is subject to the same capabilities when it tries to do system calls for apps? That would seem to work fine.
Of course, the possibility exists that the AC is full of crap, but I'll defer to someone who might actually know rather than just speculating as I am.
C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all.
I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel.
And, of course, a good concept with an incompatible implementation could never, ever be reimplemented to work on a different operating system or programming language.
This sounds like something that could be useful for Android apps.
You know what, that's too harsh. Let me put it a different way: Why deprive the PC users of an advantage rather than merely disclosing it? There is no reason for a blanket ban on PC users playing against console users. You just identify which kind of device a competing player is using, and if you don't want to play against PC users, don't play against PC users. You can always kick them out of the session (or the developers can provide whoever is hosting/creating the session an option to not let them join).
The console gamer will complain about "balance" --- anything that gives the PC gamer a competitive edge.
Why doesn't the console gamer either hook up a PC to the TV or STFU? It seems silly to complain about an advantage that you can fairly easily claim for yourself.
After all, Nintendo doesn't want to suddenly have games appearing for free, or for 99 cents, on their Wii platform. Not only, those games probably wouldn't take good advantage of their highly specialized hardware, but those games could potentially crowd out the much more expensive other games they have on it.
So instead they would rather see people adopt other platforms in addition to theirs, where users can get 99 cent games, and then see their platform fall into disuse as developers realize they make more money putting their $50 games on all platforms than just some, and then users realize they get all games on the platforms with 99 cent games and abandon the exclusionary platforms?
Stupid exclusionary tactics where you try to screw over your users only works until you have a competitor that doesn't play by the same rules.
The reason I mention "if you want to stick to those phones" is because you have a much greater choice if you just pick up a plan+phone, or prepaid phone, from any provider you please, and use it to make actual calls - keeping your N9/iPhone around for chatting, internetting, etc. on e.g. WiFi networks (your hotel / place you stay, starbucks, mcdonald's, book stores, whatever).
It surprises me that more domestic US users don't do the same thing. It's to the point that you can get second hand Android phones on eBay and elsewhere for $100-$200. (They sometimes have a "bad ESN" meaning the carrier won't activate it for some reason, e.g. the user filed an insurance claim thinking the phone was broken but then someone either realized it wasn't or fixed it and resold it, or because the carriers are just jackasses who refuse to activate used phones etc. But if you're only going to use it on WiFi then what the carrier thinks doesn't much matter.) Then put Cyanogen on it, use it on WiFi and get yourself a cheap flip phone for actual phone calls.
According to your wikipedia link:
Section 512(c) applies to OSPs [online service providers] that store infringing material. In addition to the two general requirements that OSPs comply with standard technical measures and remove repeat infringers, 512(c) also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and 3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.
I don't see anything about 'common carrier' or 'no editorial control' etc.
I suppose you could argue that if they have some human in there reading every single posting and approving them then they could have trouble with (2) because that might cause them to "be aware of the presence of infringing material" (assuming they didn't remove it when they became aware of it), but nobody is ever going to inspect everything manually anyway because it's prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile I don't see how that applies to, for example, removing unwanted FUD after you already become aware of them by chance or through normal usage, or having an algorithm that deprioritizes materials the algorithm categorizes as undesirable or inflammatory. It isn't removing unwanted material that seems to be the trouble, it's being aware of infringing material and not removing it.
WTF?
I know people love to whine about how over-priced movies are, and how that justifies your piracy, but seriously, these are two block busters from 2010 for the price of a McDonald's meal. What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
I don't actually "pirate stuff" hardly at all, but do you want the real answer?
The first thing to understand is that different people turn to piracy for different reasons. The one you're ostensibly arguing against is this one. And that is the reason why your argument fails: The problem is not "DVDs should be $10." The problem is that a legitimate copy of a sufficiently recent show or movie is not available. Not for $10, not for $20, not for $50. And by the time it is available on DVD, $20 is no longer an attractive price because you've already seen the content (one way or another) and it frequently isn't worth $20 to buy something old that you've already seen.
But there is an implicit assumption in your argument that bears pointing out: Even if you improve the attractiveness of legitimate offerings, that will never "stop" piracy, because people turn to piracy for different reasons. What it will do is increase revenues, because you do convert the subset of pirates who turn to piracy because of a lack of attractive legitimate offerings, in exactly the same way that iTunes did for music and substantially reduced music piracy.
But it won't stop people who turn to piracy for reasons other than lack of legitimate availability. There is a large subset of pirates who do it because they consider "fuck the MPAA" to be a public service. If you want to convert those people, you have to adopt a strategy that targets them -- like the MPAA publicly (and in actual fact) abandoning its lobbying campaign to enact legislation and treaties that support DRM and impinge civil liberties.
Before this clarification, businesses could and were easily exploiting NFP status to avoid taxes. For example, WalMart could set up a trifling scholarship fund, claim its revenue is intended to further education, and suddenly be free of billions of dollars of income tax obligations.
Right. So? That's kind of the idea. If they were a nonprofit then the billions in "profits" would have no other permissible use than either to expand the business (good for the economy and increases the amount of charity that can be done later) or add securities to the endowment (same) or to actually do the charity work. There would be no shareholders and diverting the money to any private interest would be fraud.
In theory they could keep expanding the company indefinitely and never actually do any charity work, but what would be the point of that? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sit on a huge pile of cash earmarked for charity and never actually do the charity.
You must look at how corrupt and unscrupulous sociopaths could abuse the system to the detriment of others.
Sure, you can get sociopaths who take control of some portion of the nonprofits and try to loot them, but that would violate the corporation's charter and therefore be illegal. And the employees who subsequently lose their jobs and the beneficiaries who subsequently lose their benefits would have good incentive to see that person prosecuted.
In addition to that, we have that problem already. The existing system encourages that problem. Under the current system, the CEO who refuses to engage in de facto collusion with competitors is fired and the CEO who engages in it is given a bonus. Most of the assholes who ran Enron have retired comfortably with their golden parachutes. When the worst case outcome for a proposed alternative system is the existing system, I don't see much to complain about.
I guess my point is, the only way to get real investment is to offer a return for the risk. Greed is the best human motivator.
Sure, but once you have an endowment (which you can get from soliciting donors as all charities do), you can act much like any other company in seeking out talent. There is nothing in human nature that prevents a company from paying executives and engineering talent bonuses based on how much the enterprise grows, regardless of whether it is a nonprofit.
The idea is not just to have a nonprofit engage in commerce to raise money. They can do that by investing whatever endowment they have in for-profit companies. The key is to engage in commerce, charitably. You can offer your services at cost for the poor. You can choose not to screw over your customers. You can refuse to collude with competitors or engage in conscious parallelism. Those things make a company less profitable, but not unprofitable -- and they tend to make the entire industry less profitable, not just the company doing it, because customers who suddenly have a choice to buy from someone who doesn't screw them over will do so and that forces everyone else to stop screwing them over too. And lower (but still positive) profits are another word for increased market efficiency, because getting more for less increases demand which means more economic activity and more jobs.
I'm slowly noticing that in every sector of business you end up with two megacorps, one with a huge market share, the other with a slightly smaller, but nonetheless monolithic, one, and then a couple fringe/niche underdogs. I don't actually know if this is healthy.
Oh, it's not healthy at all. But it's the inevitable result of the set of laws we have right now.
Markets in general tend toward monopoly anyway. The reason you see two major companies instead of one is that that is about the extent of what the antitrust laws will do: They'll generally prevent the biggest company from buying the second biggest, both not prevent the second biggest from buying the third biggest. So the #2 buys the #3 and becomes the new #1. A few years later the new #2 buys the new #3, repeat until duopoly.
On top of that, we have a tax code that favors stock price appreciation to dividends, so companies have a tax incentive to use profits to buy their competitors rather than return it to their shareholders (who might otherwise have reinvested it in smaller rather than larger entities). On top of that, the truly epic amount of money that law firms and investment banks make on large corporate merges and acquisitions causes them to be constantly on the hunt for companies they can convince to buy each other (and then pay them, literally, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to do the paperwork).
So most of the laws tend to accelerate the road to a monopoly, and then the antitrust laws stop it at the penultimate step when there are only two companies left. It's a damn catastrophe and the results are going to end up looking a lot like the results of communism pretty soon (with corporate directors and executives as the unaccountable ruling communist party) unless something changes.
The world would be a better place, probably, if everything turned into a socially oriented non-profit, but doing so would require laws that are pretty disagreeable, and ultimately people do have the right to be greedy as long as their is no direct harm to others.
I'm not advocating getting rid of profit-seeking companies. They have good uses -- like giving investors something to invest in. But that is a far cry from saying that we must or should have an economy which is 99% controlled by for-profit entities. 50% would be quite sufficient.
And there are a lot of small steps that could be taken to fix it without any huge one-time drastic action. For one thing, remove the prohibition on tax exempt nonprofits operating a commercial enterprise as a fundraising mechanism. Then take, say, 1% of the federal budget and use the money to commission several such companies every year in various industries, in the nature of venture capitalism (with small entrepreneurs pitching their ideas and the government funding the best ones), except that instead of being owned by the capitalists or the governments, they would be nonprofits owned by nobody and run by the entrepreneurs (bound by the corporation's charter) who get to implement their big ideas without worrying about where their next meal comes from.
We should start a campaign to have them donate it to the EFF.
Frankly this corporate cheerleading is getting a little old and one begins to wonder if there isn't something to the rumor that Google pays posters to hang around at geek sites to protect their branding.
So which company is it that pays you to do it then? Should we look for evidence of you being a shill, if we're being so suspicious of people?
Google "Does no evil"
People who claim that Google's motto is "do no evil" instead of "don't be evil" in the face of basically anyone who pays any attention correcting them continuously is either being willfully ignorant or is being paid to be willfully ignorant. Shills prefer "do no evil" because it's an impossible standard: Nobody agrees what evil is. If they work with copyright holders then they're evil MAFIAA censors, if they refuse then they're evil pirate sympathizers wrecking the economy, if they look for middle ground then they're both.
Now let's consider the disregard for facts (typical of shills):
if they weren't they wouldn't have become a fortune 50 company
Apple and Microsoft are in the Fortune 50. Google is number 92 (on the 2011 list).
That's just this post. Do you want to see if anyone is interested in looking through your history for more evidence that someone is paying you to attack Google (like repeated postings of the same talking points), or are you finished trolling?
What they're saying is your company chooses when the ugprades are done and can give employees a heads up.
Only to a very limited extent. When Office 2007 came out, the next thing everybody knew, people from other companies are sending them .docx files they couldn't open. Then you're running around having to install the compatibility pack on everybody's machine, which doesn't actually work properly on a lot of files (and tends to convert formulas into uneditable pictures). The only real solution to that is to go out and pay for Office 2007 and retrain all your users. The fact that you might have a period of time in which to do it (or not, if the compatibility pack's failings are causing immediate problems) is little comfort -- it's an undesired additional cost whether you do it immediately or a year later.
No one's come up with a better system that capitalist republics yet, and the alternatives are all horrible: Marxism, feudalism, etc.
I came up with one once. It looks a lot like capitalism, but not exactly.
If you think about why capitalism works, it's because power has competition. (And when you think about where it fails, it's where power doesn't have competition.) Because where there is competition, efficient companies succeed and inefficient companies fail.
But you can have competition without greed. Suppose you have corporations chartered for purposes other than maximizing shareholder value: For example, if the goal of a corporation is to engage in commercial activity and use the profits to operate soup kitchens and homeless shelters, or to fund basic scientific research, or to break into consolidated markets with high barriers to entry, whether or not doing those things is profit-maximizing. So for example, you have a drug company like Pfizer, but instead of having shareholders who take profits as dividends, they use the profits to subsidize healthcare for the poor.
And I always wondered why no one had ever tried that before. I actually found out the answer last year. They did try that. In the early 20th century. And it worked. And one of the reasons it worked really well was that if you weren't a profit-seeking corporation, you could incorporate as a non-profit and you didn't have to pay taxes, so all the money that a for-profit corporation would have paid in taxes could instead go to either expanding the enterprise or to doing a larger amount of unprofitable charity work. Which made the IRS very unhappy -- if not-for-profit corporations start successfully taking over industries and using the margins to do charity, the government loses out on a lot of tax revenue. So they banned it. They prohibited tax exempt organizations from doing business commercially in order to raise money to do their charity work.
So you can still do it, but you have to organize as a taxable corporation. And then you have no way of raising the initial capital, because investors will want an ownership stake (which makes you a traditional for-profit corporation again) and donors want a tax deduction (which the IRS disallows if you're a commercial enterprise, profit-seeking or otherwise). So those kinds of corporations effectively no longer exist.
But they could if we wanted them to and changed the law.
Where do people come up with this nonsense? They can control the content all the like. But if they do it in a way that is detrimental to their users, people will switch to something else. That is what keeps them from censoring Microsoft and anyone else critical of them, not whatever "'web host' IP protection status" is supposed to mean.
Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't running a FUD campaign against them. (It seems that they are.)
By this logic if there are only too parties running and the Democrat is too moderate for you, you should vote for the Republican (and write the Democrat a letter saying why) to punish the Democrat for not leaning more to the left. Which I suppose is a possible strategy in game theory... but the result is likely to be a series of huge swings from very conservative Republicans to very socialist Democrats as the two extremes both punish any candidate who approaches the middle, rather than a series of moderates who can largely get along with one another and make reasonable compromises.
It also seems unlikely they'd open themselves up to another huge anti-trust lawsuit.
By doing which, fabricating AMD's chips or refusing to?
Hell, if people show up and actually vote for the person they truly believe will do the best job rather than concede their vote will be "thrown away" if they don't vote for one chosen for them, we might see some truly spectacular democracy.
And we might see some truly spectacular fascism.
People envision third parties winning landslides if people would only vote for them, as though that is the only thing stopping literally everyone from agreeing that Your Candidate is the best candidate. But that almost never happens in reality. Unless all the other candidates are a bunch of ugly stupid pedophiles with no money, there is no candidate in a three-or-more-way race that will get 75% of the vote -- because at least one of the other candidates will appeal to a larger voting bloc than that. There are issues where the country is split close to 50-50, so whether your candidate's position is X or not-X, half the voters oppose that position.
But whenever you have a close race, having more than two viable candidates results in epic fail, because the fascist wins with 40% of the vote after the anti-fascist candidates split the remainder.
Ballot access is pointless. Third parties are pointless.
What you need are better candidates, not more parties.
For instance the democrats are now afraid to give give the green party too much space because of what happened in 2000, and the republicans are similarly letting Ron Paul be a candidate even though they despise the guy, just to avoid the threat of him running for an independent party stealing a possible win..
That is exactly what I am talking about. Ron Paul is not running as a Libertarian, he is running in the Republican primary. Viable would-be Green party candidates can do the same thing in the Democratic primary (when there is one).
There is also another alternative, specifically for presidential elections and elections in districts that lean strongly in one direction: If a third party (e.g. Ralph Nader) runs, they should only run in guaranteed districts. Greens are most viable in 80% Democratic Congressional districts anyway. Or put your name on the ballot for President in California and Massachusetts, but not Florida or Ohio. Then you can show how much support you have, and get yourself in front of a microphone, without changing the outcome of any elections to favor the greater of two evils.
But that isn't a distinction people generally make when they talk about voting for third parties. If you have an election between two major parties that each have a significant chance of winning, voting for a third party is still voting against the major party most like them. If you know the election is going to be a landslide for one candidate, then vote for whoever you want because it isn't going to matter.
OK, let me respond to this from the post you linked:
The more people vote 3rd party- the more people will see it as a legitimate stance- which hopefully one day will lead to more than two parties.
That won't happen unless you change the voting system. If it attempts to happen, you see what you saw in Lincoln's time with the Whigs and the Republicans: The Republicans became a viable third party, then the Whigs immediately died off and their members joined the Republicans. Because everyone who is paying attention realizes that it's better to join forces with whoever is most like you than to split the vote with them. Which won't change unless we change the voting system.