Nonsense, thinking that we are somehow able to improve upon the Divine plan of God is hubris of the highest order. God's plan has given us the wonderful variety of life that we see today, not some "scientist" more interested than having his name on a paper than the ethical and moral implications of their work.
There is, quite simply, no good reason for genetic engineering, and many bad ones. We have reached the point where science is moving too fast for ethical considerations to be applied, and the amoral leanings that the genetics community has displayed so far does not given me confidence that the right thing will be done.
We need to stop all of this research now and appoint an ethics committe comprised of both the finest scientific and religious minds to determine what should be allowed to be done. Hopefully, common sense and Christian decency will prevail over the "research now and worry about it later" attitude displayed by scientists.
Hey, it was a joke... I was just replying to anonymous cowerd's over the top post with an even more silly one:) For the record unfortunately I do wear a suit to work, and I fucking hate it with a passion. And unfortunately I'm not being paid enough (yet)... But I do get to read/. at work.
Right. So how comes Canada didn't start a revolution, and yet they seem to be independent nowadays? There are far better ways to get what you want than violence, but unfortunately that lesson seems to have escaped the US psyche.
He also embodies what used to be considered American values.
What, using violence as a means to get what you want without concern for the consequences or ethics? If that's what you mean Jon, then I fully agree that he's a role model for the history and "values" of the US, a nation which started a bloody revolution over taxes.
As a professional consultant working for a top IT consultancy, I've worked with and advised any number of companies, from Fortune 500 giants to small startups in the b2b and b2c sectors. And, I can tell you that your attitude smacks of the childlike inability to deal with the "real world" that is a key element of the geek psyche.
The simple fact is that smart dress, especially a tie, is essential for productive work. Wearing a suit clearly delimits your work from your home lives, and this differential means that you are always aware of what you are at work for - work! Not, as the average geek seems to think, to browse the Internet and read/., not to listen to MP3s, not to watch streaming video clips of Brittany Spears and not to chat crap on ICQ. When you are wearing a suit, you know what you're there for - hardcore money-making!
This is the real reason that so many of these Internet startups have failed - they let their workers dress how they wanted! How can you work surrounded by a group of unwashed coders whose conversation is limited to discussions of which pizza to order? Without the honest work ethic that a suit conveys, there is no hope for productivity.
Just look at RMS - looks like a bear, probably smells like a bear and what is his major gripe? The hard work that people like myself put in to make companies work, because we get paid for it. Basically, he doesn't like working and luckily enough he has found a way to avoid doing anything apart from keynote speeches. When was the last time he did any real work? 1984?
If only more people wore suits then we'd see productivity go up by a factor of two, at least. But while people like you insist on "comfort" over results, this industry will remain full of lazy, irresponsible "geeks".
So if you compile your program with gcc then you shouldn't sell it since it used an open sourced tool to compile it? Is this something you might like the GPL to cover - "If you have ever used a GPLed tool then all software you ever write must also be GPLed".
What tools it uses shouldn't matter. Otherwise you'll see a vast dearth of commercial interest in Linux as they decide that it's not worth the hassle.
As a consultant that has worked in the industry for some years now, I can say that your situation is not unique and all, and that there are quite a few companies in the same boat as you.
Whilst excersing my new-found elite Linux skills using my Corel Linux box at home I have found an essay by someone called Eric S Ramond called "The Cathedral in the Bazaar" about the values of open source vs. closed source. An interesting read, if a bit naive, but it misses out one important point - people need money to live, and if their job is programming, they need to make money from doing that.
Now the technical benefits of open source may be apparent, but the philosophical baggage that it brings with it means that do develop an open source product at work, you need to either a) generate revenue through secondary services such as support or b) be part of a large company that can support the monetary loss.
This seems to me to be an unfortunate side-effect of the GNU Public License, and it means that the smaller players in the commercial sector will be unable to move to the open source model for financial reasons. Maybe a new licensing scheme is needed?
Wow, that had so much to do with the topic at hand didn't it? What happened, did you see the story, couldn't think of anything intelligent to say so instead you thought "I know, I'll just bash Micro$haft, that's always a winner". Zealots like you give this site a bad name.
In future, if you can't think of anything relevent to say then don't say anything. Your comment added as much to this story as a first post.
Firstly I'd like to say that it's nice that/. has had someone for an interview that is way more intelligent than the average/.er, and has actually thought about how you go about doing some of the things that/.ers go on about in the real world.
Whilst I can't fault his arguments, I wonder if he's ever considered the possibility of more covert assaults? The CIA is well known for attacks on small, relatively defenceless targets that happen to piss them off, and Sealand sounds like a prime example, especially with its "host anything" policy. And the UK isn't going to stop them thanks to the relationship between the two countries.
I think it's quite possible that the US will decide that Sealand is an annoyance that can be easily dealth with, and act again to suppress a foreign group in the name of "national interest".
The problem is not with the two protocols in themselves, but more with network administrators that don't have the time or concern to implement the full range of security measures that are required to make them safe.
Not allowing FTP or Telnet to be used will increase the security for wide-open systems to an extent, but a dedicated cracker will find a way in anyway if they really want to. The trick is to make it hard enough so as not to be worth the effort, and there are a lot more things which should be done before banning FTP and Telnet will help secure a network.
And on an offtopic note, what the Hell has been happening with/. today? It comes on for ten minutes, dies for an hour and then repeats... is it anything to do with the 1.05 slash code update?
I work quite close to you then, there's a lot of computing work available in the area to be found. As EnglishTim says it is quite a pricy area to live in, but no more so than London, and the air is definitely a bit cleaner... my personal favourite is how London is always 2 degrees hotter than the surrounding areas:)
So you presume to know the mind of God? How arrogant. It may be that it's part of God's plan for man to decode himself, in order to understand more about God.
Have you ever heard of the Bible? God's mind is revealed to us through it's words. Couldn't be simpler really, could it? And I also believe that it does say that God is to be worshipped, not mocked and reviled, as these "geneticists" are doing through their work.
Christianity is the most dangerous cult in existence today.
Rubbish, Christianity has the full weight of Divine Truth behind it and anyone who has accepted the love of the Lord can feel that in their hearts everyday. I pity those of you without that love, and will do everything in my power to help you to see that love if I ever meet you.
Who do you think is going to have a stranglehold on this information in the US? In the unlikely event that you Bible-pounding shitheads get your way and Baby Bush gets elected to office, we would see a nice shiny new nation of perfect white Aryan babies.
What has Christianity got to do with race? I think it is just you who has issues there. Ultimately every person on the planet should realise the Truth of our Lord, irrespective of the colour of their skin. The only people who are to be hated are those who revel in Satan's unholy evil.
You whine about Christians being persecuted, while conventiently forgetting that you are responsible for the deaths of millions of people over the last thousand years...in the Crusades, in the Inquisition, in the Salem witch trials, in Nazi Germany, and so on and so forth.
Bear in mind that Catholics are not Christians since they worship the virgin whore rather than God. Those heathen sinners could do anything and it wouldn't suprise me, since they, like all who do not follow in the path of our Lord, are destined to Hell anyway.
Oh, puh-leeze -- humans have been doing that for millenia. (Perhaps the reason chihuahuas have such foul dispositions is that they know they are descended from wolves and humans did this to them.)
There is a difference between selective breeding and tinkering with God's blueprint for life. By directly taking a hand to DNA scientists are pretending that they have the Lord's wisdom, something which is clearly false.
This is a silly stereotype. Scientists (and pretty much everybody else, including contemporary Christians) condemn certain elements of old-style "Christian morality", such as witch-burnings and forced conversion, as backward and superstitious -- because these practices are backward and superstitious. The reasonable portions of traditional Christian morality are similar to those of any viable culture's morality, and as such are universally respected among civilized people.
Bzzt! Wrong, scientists are part of the cult of atheism which has attempted to have decent Christian teachings banned in our schools to be replaced with their cold mechanistic view of a "clockwork universe" in which the love of God has no place. Ultimately their aim is to have us all in our place, our lives ordered by the "scientific" elite according to their deterministic principles.
I, for one, would rather have the love of God on my side than a symposium full of these husks of men.
Shit, what's next? Will you be sued for having an angry mob smash your house up because they blocked the road you live on? This seems to me like a blatent attempt by an ISP to make a quick bit of cash off of a flimsy excuse, something which the US has a lot of unfortunately for it, and anyone that gets involved with it.
This bloke seems like a bit of an arsehole anyway - setting up an online bookstore called Amazon.gr is not the actions of someone who is really dedicated to starting up an online business, it's the actions of someone trying to cash in on the dot-com craze.
If I were Nike I wouldn't be too worried about this at all - the guy is an idiot out for easy money and any judge with half a brain will see that and throw the case out.
I think that an open source environment for games has two potential benefits - firstly for allowing bugs to be quickly fixed, and secondly to allow the game to be enhanced and updated in reponse to user requests and ideas.
The first point has already been covered many times here on/. but it is the second that interests me the most. Whereas some games aren't in particular need of new features or concepts, others can hugely benefit - think strategy games like Civilisation or role playing games like Worldforge as mentioned by another poster.
The transition from Civ to Civ II was not one of a radical change in the core concept of the game - instead it was a tweaking of rules, adding new features and expanding player options. Having the source code for the game would mean that these additions could me made as and when people wanted them, making the game improve over time.
So for this sort of game, open source would offer both of these advantages and could allow a program to outlast the platform it was written on:)
This is a nice piece of kit to say the least, who wouldn't want one for themselves, but look at the use it's being put to - running simulations of nuclear bombs being used. Yes, it's again part of the $1 trillion USian milatary machine, even if it is given a more publicly acceptable face through the Department of Energy's "Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program", a euphamism if I've ever heard one.
Why is it that the Pentagon still gets to spend so much money on fancy new toys for a war that will now never come? The USSR has collapsed and since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III that US military leaders have been hoping and planning for for decades. And whilst this $1 trillion goes into the military black box, poor people starve on the streets and can't afford even basic health care thanks to the Randite social policies of the US, despite what their Constitution supposedly guarantees.
No, on purely technical merits this computer is interesting, but I don't think that we, as reponsible people, should be praising something which is part of a group that contributes in a large way to the suffering of the poor and needy.
... to gouge yet more money out of fans who are so dedicated to the original series that they'll still go and watch anything with the Star Wars moniker on it, even though it's aimed at ten year old kids who think that Jar Jar Binks is actually cool, rather than being the alien equivalent of slashdot-terminal on crack.
I'm sorry, but whilst the orignal Star Wars trilogy had its appeal at the time, this time around the dubious moralising, dumb looking aliens and slushy character relationships just don't really cut the mustard with me. And a whole series about how great the kid who grew up to be Darth Vader, killer of the innocent, is - what the fuck is that about? What's next, Charles Manson - The Childhood Adventures?
Now lets watch as this post get moderated into oblivion by slashbot moderators who still think that George Lucas is something other than a tight-fisted money gouging bastard. These are the same kind of people who will buy each film on video, then each as "Director's Cut", the collected version with a 32-page commerorative booklet and then finally, in about 2020, the DVDs with amazing "enhanced" features - subtitles and an interview with The Man himself.
No, I don't work for a Fortune 500 company, I've worked with some of them. Not recently though, it's more medium-sized companies nowadays, a lot of web-based stuff. Anyway, check my user page - if I was trolling why would I have so many high scored posts?
Not online no, and although the book was called "Corporate Espionage" there are a few by that name, some of them not worth the bother of reading them. Try searching google - there are some decent links from there.
Seriously, if this comes as a suprise to anybody then they obviously don't know much about the business world at all. Corporate espionage and intelligence gathering has been one of the fastest growing market sectors, along with "head-hunting", for the last decade or so, and the trend looks set to continue.
Any corporation that wants to get ahead of its rivals in of course extremely interested in what is going on with their rivals. And there are plenty of agencies which specialise in finding out facts that aren't published in the annual company review.
As a professional consultant I've worked with very large Fortune 500 corporations, and after working on introducing an ERP solution for one of them, I was approached thorugh my agency by a "client". At lunch I was asked several innocent sounding questions about the company who I'd just been working with, and the client was never heard from again.
But, if it helps ensure more vigorous competition in the business world then I don't see how anyone can really argue that this is a bad thing - after all it's not like they're after personal secrets is it? Most corporations have too much to hide anyway.
Just a quickie - I don't agree with the Copenhagen interpretation, I go in for the transactional interpretation instead, and I wasn't talking about sentient observers, although I suppose it could be taken that way. Gotta go home now though.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense, thinking that we are somehow able to improve upon the Divine plan of God is hubris of the highest order. God's plan has given us the wonderful variety of life that we see today, not some "scientist" more interested than having his name on a paper than the ethical and moral implications of their work.
There is, quite simply, no good reason for genetic engineering, and many bad ones. We have reached the point where science is moving too fast for ethical considerations to be applied, and the amoral leanings that the genetics community has displayed so far does not given me confidence that the right thing will be done.
We need to stop all of this research now and appoint an ethics committe comprised of both the finest scientific and religious minds to determine what should be allowed to be done. Hopefully, common sense and Christian decency will prevail over the "research now and worry about it later" attitude displayed by scientists.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Hey, it was a joke... I was just replying to anonymous cowerd's over the top post with an even more silly one :) For the record unfortunately I do wear a suit to work, and I fucking hate it with a passion. And unfortunately I'm not being paid enough (yet)... But I do get to read /. at work.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Right. So how comes Canada didn't start a revolution, and yet they seem to be independent nowadays? There are far better ways to get what you want than violence, but unfortunately that lesson seems to have escaped the US psyche.
---
Jon E. Erikson
He also embodies what used to be considered American values.
What, using violence as a means to get what you want without concern for the consequences or ethics? If that's what you mean Jon, then I fully agree that he's a role model for the history and "values" of the US, a nation which started a bloody revolution over taxes.
---
Jon E. Erikson
As a professional consultant working for a top IT consultancy, I've worked with and advised any number of companies, from Fortune 500 giants to small startups in the b2b and b2c sectors. And, I can tell you that your attitude smacks of the childlike inability to deal with the "real world" that is a key element of the geek psyche.
The simple fact is that smart dress, especially a tie, is essential for productive work. Wearing a suit clearly delimits your work from your home lives, and this differential means that you are always aware of what you are at work for - work! Not, as the average geek seems to think, to browse the Internet and read /., not to listen to MP3s, not to watch streaming video clips of Brittany Spears and not to chat crap on ICQ. When you are wearing a suit, you know what you're there for - hardcore money-making!
This is the real reason that so many of these Internet startups have failed - they let their workers dress how they wanted! How can you work surrounded by a group of unwashed coders whose conversation is limited to discussions of which pizza to order? Without the honest work ethic that a suit conveys, there is no hope for productivity.
Just look at RMS - looks like a bear, probably smells like a bear and what is his major gripe? The hard work that people like myself put in to make companies work, because we get paid for it. Basically, he doesn't like working and luckily enough he has found a way to avoid doing anything apart from keynote speeches. When was the last time he did any real work? 1984?
If only more people wore suits then we'd see productivity go up by a factor of two, at least. But while people like you insist on "comfort" over results, this industry will remain full of lazy, irresponsible "geeks".
---
Jon E. Erikson
Why can't I use the decrypting program to decrypt the encrypted source?
Because you don't have the encryption key? That'd make it quite hard wouldn't it?
---
Jon E. Erikson
So if you compile your program with gcc then you shouldn't sell it since it used an open sourced tool to compile it? Is this something you might like the GPL to cover - "If you have ever used a GPLed tool then all software you ever write must also be GPLed".
What tools it uses shouldn't matter. Otherwise you'll see a vast dearth of commercial interest in Linux as they decide that it's not worth the hassle.
---
Jon E. Erikson
As a consultant that has worked in the industry for some years now, I can say that your situation is not unique and all, and that there are quite a few companies in the same boat as you.
Whilst excersing my new-found elite Linux skills using my Corel Linux box at home I have found an essay by someone called Eric S Ramond called "The Cathedral in the Bazaar" about the values of open source vs. closed source. An interesting read, if a bit naive, but it misses out one important point - people need money to live, and if their job is programming, they need to make money from doing that.
Now the technical benefits of open source may be apparent, but the philosophical baggage that it brings with it means that do develop an open source product at work, you need to either a) generate revenue through secondary services such as support or b) be part of a large company that can support the monetary loss.
This seems to me to be an unfortunate side-effect of the GNU Public License, and it means that the smaller players in the commercial sector will be unable to move to the open source model for financial reasons. Maybe a new licensing scheme is needed?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Wow, that had so much to do with the topic at hand didn't it? What happened, did you see the story, couldn't think of anything intelligent to say so instead you thought "I know, I'll just bash Micro$haft, that's always a winner". Zealots like you give this site a bad name.
In future, if you can't think of anything relevent to say then don't say anything. Your comment added as much to this story as a first post.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Firstly I'd like to say that it's nice that /. has had someone for an interview that is way more intelligent than the average /.er, and has actually thought about how you go about doing some of the things that /.ers go on about in the real world.
Whilst I can't fault his arguments, I wonder if he's ever considered the possibility of more covert assaults? The CIA is well known for attacks on small, relatively defenceless targets that happen to piss them off, and Sealand sounds like a prime example, especially with its "host anything" policy. And the UK isn't going to stop them thanks to the relationship between the two countries.
I think it's quite possible that the US will decide that Sealand is an annoyance that can be easily dealth with, and act again to suppress a foreign group in the name of "national interest".
---
Jon E. Erikson
The problem is not with the two protocols in themselves, but more with network administrators that don't have the time or concern to implement the full range of security measures that are required to make them safe.
Not allowing FTP or Telnet to be used will increase the security for wide-open systems to an extent, but a dedicated cracker will find a way in anyway if they really want to. The trick is to make it hard enough so as not to be worth the effort, and there are a lot more things which should be done before banning FTP and Telnet will help secure a network.
And on an offtopic note, what the Hell has been happening with /. today? It comes on for ten minutes, dies for an hour and then repeats... is it anything to do with the 1.05 slash code update?
---
Jon E. Erikson
I work quite close to you then, there's a lot of computing work available in the area to be found. As EnglishTim says it is quite a pricy area to live in, but no more so than London, and the air is definitely a bit cleaner... my personal favourite is how London is always 2 degrees hotter than the surrounding areas :)
---
Jon E. Erikson
So you presume to know the mind of God? How arrogant. It may be that it's part of God's plan for man to decode himself, in order to understand more about God.
Have you ever heard of the Bible? God's mind is revealed to us through it's words. Couldn't be simpler really, could it? And I also believe that it does say that God is to be worshipped, not mocked and reviled, as these "geneticists" are doing through their work.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Christianity is the most dangerous cult in existence today.
Rubbish, Christianity has the full weight of Divine Truth behind it and anyone who has accepted the love of the Lord can feel that in their hearts everyday. I pity those of you without that love, and will do everything in my power to help you to see that love if I ever meet you.
Who do you think is going to have a stranglehold on this information in the US? In the unlikely event that you Bible-pounding shitheads get your way and Baby Bush gets elected to office, we would see a nice shiny new nation of perfect white Aryan babies.
What has Christianity got to do with race? I think it is just you who has issues there. Ultimately every person on the planet should realise the Truth of our Lord, irrespective of the colour of their skin. The only people who are to be hated are those who revel in Satan's unholy evil.
You whine about Christians being persecuted, while conventiently forgetting that you are responsible for the deaths of millions of people over the last thousand years...in the Crusades, in the Inquisition, in the Salem witch trials, in Nazi Germany, and so on and so forth.
Bear in mind that Catholics are not Christians since they worship the virgin whore rather than God. Those heathen sinners could do anything and it wouldn't suprise me, since they, like all who do not follow in the path of our Lord, are destined to Hell anyway.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Oh, puh-leeze -- humans have been doing that for millenia. (Perhaps the reason chihuahuas have such foul dispositions is that they know they are descended from wolves and humans did this to them.)
There is a difference between selective breeding and tinkering with God's blueprint for life. By directly taking a hand to DNA scientists are pretending that they have the Lord's wisdom, something which is clearly false.
This is a silly stereotype. Scientists (and pretty much everybody else, including contemporary Christians) condemn certain elements of old-style "Christian morality", such as witch-burnings and forced conversion, as backward and superstitious -- because these practices are backward and superstitious. The reasonable portions of traditional Christian morality are similar to those of any viable culture's morality, and as such are universally respected among civilized people.
Bzzt! Wrong, scientists are part of the cult of atheism which has attempted to have decent Christian teachings banned in our schools to be replaced with their cold mechanistic view of a "clockwork universe" in which the love of God has no place. Ultimately their aim is to have us all in our place, our lives ordered by the "scientific" elite according to their deterministic principles.
I, for one, would rather have the love of God on my side than a symposium full of these husks of men.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Shit, what's next? Will you be sued for having an angry mob smash your house up because they blocked the road you live on? This seems to me like a blatent attempt by an ISP to make a quick bit of cash off of a flimsy excuse, something which the US has a lot of unfortunately for it, and anyone that gets involved with it.
This bloke seems like a bit of an arsehole anyway - setting up an online bookstore called Amazon.gr is not the actions of someone who is really dedicated to starting up an online business, it's the actions of someone trying to cash in on the dot-com craze.
If I were Nike I wouldn't be too worried about this at all - the guy is an idiot out for easy money and any judge with half a brain will see that and throw the case out.
---
Jon E. Erikson
I think that an open source environment for games has two potential benefits - firstly for allowing bugs to be quickly fixed, and secondly to allow the game to be enhanced and updated in reponse to user requests and ideas.
The first point has already been covered many times here on /. but it is the second that interests me the most. Whereas some games aren't in particular need of new features or concepts, others can hugely benefit - think strategy games like Civilisation or role playing games like Worldforge as mentioned by another poster.
The transition from Civ to Civ II was not one of a radical change in the core concept of the game - instead it was a tweaking of rules, adding new features and expanding player options. Having the source code for the game would mean that these additions could me made as and when people wanted them, making the game improve over time.
So for this sort of game, open source would offer both of these advantages and could allow a program to outlast the platform it was written on :)
---
Jon E. Erikson
This is a nice piece of kit to say the least, who wouldn't want one for themselves, but look at the use it's being put to - running simulations of nuclear bombs being used. Yes, it's again part of the $1 trillion USian milatary machine, even if it is given a more publicly acceptable face through the Department of Energy's "Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program", a euphamism if I've ever heard one.
Why is it that the Pentagon still gets to spend so much money on fancy new toys for a war that will now never come? The USSR has collapsed and since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III that US military leaders have been hoping and planning for for decades. And whilst this $1 trillion goes into the military black box, poor people starve on the streets and can't afford even basic health care thanks to the Randite social policies of the US, despite what their Constitution supposedly guarantees.
No, on purely technical merits this computer is interesting, but I don't think that we, as reponsible people, should be praising something which is part of a group that contributes in a large way to the suffering of the poor and needy.
---
Jon E. Erikson
... to gouge yet more money out of fans who are so dedicated to the original series that they'll still go and watch anything with the Star Wars moniker on it, even though it's aimed at ten year old kids who think that Jar Jar Binks is actually cool, rather than being the alien equivalent of slashdot-terminal on crack.
I'm sorry, but whilst the orignal Star Wars trilogy had its appeal at the time, this time around the dubious moralising, dumb looking aliens and slushy character relationships just don't really cut the mustard with me. And a whole series about how great the kid who grew up to be Darth Vader, killer of the innocent, is - what the fuck is that about? What's next, Charles Manson - The Childhood Adventures?
Now lets watch as this post get moderated into oblivion by slashbot moderators who still think that George Lucas is something other than a tight-fisted money gouging bastard. These are the same kind of people who will buy each film on video, then each as "Director's Cut", the collected version with a 32-page commerorative booklet and then finally, in about 2020, the DVDs with amazing "enhanced" features - subtitles and an interview with The Man himself.
Nope, I just can't wait for this film.
---
Jon E. Erikson
No, I don't work for a Fortune 500 company, I've worked with some of them. Not recently though, it's more medium-sized companies nowadays, a lot of web-based stuff. Anyway, check my user page - if I was trolling why would I have so many high scored posts?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Not online no, and although the book was called "Corporate Espionage" there are a few by that name, some of them not worth the bother of reading them. Try searching google - there are some decent links from there.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Seriously, if this comes as a suprise to anybody then they obviously don't know much about the business world at all. Corporate espionage and intelligence gathering has been one of the fastest growing market sectors, along with "head-hunting", for the last decade or so, and the trend looks set to continue.
Any corporation that wants to get ahead of its rivals in of course extremely interested in what is going on with their rivals. And there are plenty of agencies which specialise in finding out facts that aren't published in the annual company review.
As a professional consultant I've worked with very large Fortune 500 corporations, and after working on introducing an ERP solution for one of them, I was approached thorugh my agency by a "client". At lunch I was asked several innocent sounding questions about the company who I'd just been working with, and the client was never heard from again.
But, if it helps ensure more vigorous competition in the business world then I don't see how anyone can really argue that this is a bad thing - after all it's not like they're after personal secrets is it? Most corporations have too much to hide anyway.
---
Jon E. Erikson
The time doesn't change for daylight savings - I'm in London, England but to get the correct times I'm using French Western time instead...
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Jon E. Erikson
Just a quickie - I don't agree with the Copenhagen interpretation, I go in for the transactional interpretation instead, and I wasn't talking about sentient observers, although I suppose it could be taken that way. Gotta go home now though.
---
Jon E. Erikson
So what if mp3board.com finds pirate music for you? Do they actually pirate music?
So what if mp3board.com finds illegal drugs for you? Do they actually make drugs?
Does that make my position any clearer?
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Jon E. Erikson