Coca-Cola's is around 28%; Microsoft's is 38.9%. Intel is 24.5%. General Electric, an old line commodity product company is 16.5%.
Investment analysts like the Motley Fool recommend that you do not invest in a company unless their margin is at least 10% as otherwise they will not have the ability to fund future expansion, or weather an economic recession.
It seems to me that the author makes a big deal about Brazil being such a poor nation.
Utter Hogwash.
Brazil, on an international scale is a RICH country. It has the eighth largest economy in the world, just behind Mainland China and just ahead of Canada.
The rest of the article is equally distorted - for example the claims that the pharmaceutical industry spends little on R&D at 33% of sales. THAT IS FIFTEEN TIMES THE AVERAGE IN US INDUSTRIES. The fact is that no other industry spends more on R&D than Pharma.
Then it goes on to talk about the AIDS epidemic in Africa as if it were the fault of the US Pharmaceutical companies. Baloney. If you examine the various causes of AIDS in Africa one rapidly is forced to the conclusion that they failures to control the epidemic in some areas (but not others) have nothing to do with the availability of treatments. Treatments have NOTHING to do with the spread of the disease, only how long it takes for those infected to die. It has been long known to epidemiologists that the problems with AIDS in Africa are mostly of a cultural nature. This is why AIDS is a minor problem in poor Islamic nations in the north, and a major problem in richer southern nations.
The is the worst kind of distorted journalism one can imagine because it twists the facts to the prejudices of the author. It is sickening to me to see a publication like the NYT print such a piece. It is even more sickening to me to see the readers of slashdot swallow this hook, line and sinker.
Would an American care to enlighten us non-us residents as to how these times compare to the usual delivery times of the USPS? Six to seven days is quite a long time and I just wondered whether that was usual for packaging in the US.
There are a variety of services one can choose, first class or priority mail (air) is usually 2-3 days, and is the normal method for letters and priority packages. Parcel post (which I imagine these were sent as) is essentially a ground shipment method and normally takes several days cross-country but is less expensive. Bulk or book rates are slower yet.
This is one of the weakest areguments I have ever heard against IP - that it interferes with the free market.
The 'Free Market' is no particular holy grail of goodness, and in fact the long history of the capitalism has shown quite clearly that an unfettered free market does NOT yield an economy that results in the best society.
A free market has no restrictions on the behaviour of corporations whatsoever. They are free to engage in price fixing, formation of monopolies, egregious treatment of employees, sale of dangerous products, false advertising, copying of their competitor's trademarks, mislabelling their products contents, and whatever forms of environmental rape that result in their greatest profit.
This argument would return us to the days of the giant monopolies of the early part of the 20th century, sale of tainted food (see Upton Sinclair), use of opiates in soft drinks, a workforce where 25% have lost body parts to unsafe machinery, and rivers that catch fire from their carriage of industrial wastes.
The free market is NECCESSARILY regulated to insure competition and control of the behaviour of corporations. Labor laws, environmental regualtions and contract law are all part of this, as is IP law.
IP laws improve the quality of our society by providing special incentives to the creation of new information - be it art,literature,music or technologies. The elimination of these incentives will impoversh us far more than the relataively small and temporary economic benefits that individuals would gain if the existing rights accrued to authors were eliminated.
'I've basically thrown away all patches sent to me so far, and I will continue to do so at least over the weekend. I'm not going to bother thinking about patches for a few days.'
The reason that Torvalds is throwing away patches is that it is his judgement that the state of the 2.4.0 kernel is such that it needs to be tested for a while so that whatever problems it might have become better understood. It's all described in the kernel mailing list, and is a perfectly normaly part of the software development process.
People who think Linus is killing Linux have no understanding of open source. If somebody thinks they can do a better job, they are perfect free to fork Linux are run with it. The fact taht such forks don't exist is a very good indication of how good a job Linus is doing.
I don't have a link, but I distinctly remember that resolution being passed.
There has been some whining about human cloning in various documents from UN agencies such as UNESCO, but I think that the UN doesn't really have the power to make anything like this illegal.
In any case, how is this really different from any other artificial method of producing an embryo using genetic material from sperm banks, donated eggs, etc.? We have many natural clones running around (identical twins) anyway. How will a few artificial ones be materially different?
Of much greater concern is genetically modified humans. THAT is something very serious - and the time is coming. I recently saw an article describing the first genetically modified primate - a monkey with a special gene that produces a flourescent dye for use in research. Now THAT is scary.
Actually that is incorrect. If a company places a privacy statement in their advertising, and fails to adhere to it they become liable under US commercial codes for breaking a contract with thier customers. The FTC regularly fines companies that engage in such practices.
A lot of folks are speaking out against this because they don't see a need in the high tech industry - they have technology skills that are giving them a good living.
However these unions are not aiming to organize the highly skilled professional - they are aiming at the thousands of lower skilled workers in the technology industry - the customer service reps working phone banks, the warehouse workers, etc.
These are people who are often forced into very poor working conditions, sometimes with little regard for such niceties as pay above minimum wage, sick leave, and so on. If you are such a worker a union can be a positive.
Management that comes out in a aggressive manner to fight a organization makes me wonder why they feel the need. If a company is treating it's workers well, they have no incentive to organize. It's the companies that are treating their workers shoddily that get organized.
It is interesting that your "evidence" is so completely irrational.
That is a silly claim. I present facts regarding cases where it is clearly illustrated that free speech is NOT as well protected in Britain, and you try to dismiss this as irrational. Well, I think that this dismissal is in itself irrational as you have not presented any countering argument to my evidence that the legal protection of free speech in the US is greater than in Britain.
As far as speaking what you think, there is in any society a social norm as to what is considered polite, and what is considered impolite. Clearly your voicing of your prejudices against America might be considered impolite to your American hosts. Surely Americans get much criticism for voicing their views when visiting other countries. Perhaps you percieve this as lack of freedom of speech. Other people might feel that you are merely being rude and obnoxious.
In regards to your run-in with the immigration service, well, I too have had problems with petty bureacrats - in many countries. It is universal.
As far as eToy goes, that was simply a trademark dispute. As such it has NOTHING to do with censorship.
There were a good number of laws in effect in Dunblane regulating the ownership of firearms prior to the massacre occurred. The laws were quite restrictive by US standards.
What you have now is an outright ban on handguns larger than 22 caliber, which has been in effect about 3 years. Whether or not that will stop such events remains to be seen.
In the US the courts are constantly full of people being taken to court for their opinions
This is just some figment of your imagination. The fact is that people publish uncomplementary opinions regarding companies ALL THE TIME without any such actions. Hell, if your theory were true people would be getting sued for publishing bad movie reviews. It just isn't so.
Look at the recent Firestone case - this company was dragged through the media and whipped on by the press beyond all imagination. Show me ONE instance where Firestone sued any of it's critics.
Our press have a history of freely saying what they like
Perhaps, however government censorship of the press is a lot easier in England than in the US. There is NO guarantee of freedom of the press at the level of the US in Britain.
If you don't believe my assertions regarding British libel law vs. free speech in the US, look at the case where Dr. Godfrey sued several people outside the US for libel and won, where in the US his case was thrown out for infringing on free speech. Here is some background from an article in the NYT:
Fri, 5 Jun 1998 16:44:46 -0400 (EDT)
Dr. L. Godfrey is suing Cornell university and a former Cornell grad student for libel in London complaining about messages posted by the student
(M. Dolenga) on the usenet group soc.culture.canada 3 years ago. Dr. Godfrey has previously settled a case in which he sued a British physicist and won a libel suit against an Australian ISP. He also has two other Internet defamation cases he is pursuing. The general issue here is that UK libel law often prohibits speech which in the US is protected by the
first amendment. If the usenet articles were written in the US and transmitted to the UK, which laws apply? "English Court May Test U.S. Ideals on Online Speech" -- *The New York Times* (5 Jun 1998, electronic edition)
One of the most famous cases showing the problems with British libel law was the Living Marxism suit, which prompted Noam Chomsky to come out and write "reform of libel law is crucial for British democracy" in a letter to the London Times dated March 16, 2000.
Here we have cases which CLEARLY illustrate what I am talking about - what is protected speech in the US can and DOES get you sued in other countries, including Britain.
I have about had it with people outside the US critcising the state of our freedoms when in FACT they are better than the home country of the person doing the criticising, and a little research can easily turn up factualy evidence to illustrate the truth.
I am sure that you know a good deal about the laws and freedoms in Britain. However I find your comments about the lack of freedoms in America ignorant.
For example:
"America has in there bill of rights stuff about free speach but if you say what you think then you get your yourself taken to court."
The actual fact is that it is much harder to bring a libel case in the US than it is in Britain. In the US public figures cannot bring libel cases unless you can prove intent to do harm by publishing facts that you knew were incorrect, which is extremely difficult. The libel standards in Britain are much lower, making it much harder to publish freely.
The fact is that the US rights to freedom of the press and freedom of speech are MUCH stronger than they are in Britain, and have been for over 200 years.
Whatever happened to the good old French policy of striking whenever something you didn't agree with was imposed?
I mean if duck hunters can go on strike (Good for the ducks I guess) because of losing some ancestral hunting rights, why shouldn't there be an even bigger response to this sort of nonsense?
There have been endless studies of exposure to non-ionizing radiation, and the fact is that there has never been a confirmend mechanism or result that has held up with time that any such radiation causes cancer.
A sample size of 118 positives and 475 negatives, along with speculation of a mechanism which itself may not actually be proven, and is only one involving growth rate, not initiation hardly looks to me to outwegh all the previous work in this field.
The United States would not be the first or by any means the only country that uses machines of this nature to count votes. Brazil, for example, uses devices not too much different from those proposed by this inititative. In fact Unisys has experience supplying this technology to several other countries.
Computers offer some real advantages compared to doing this by hand, as long election experience has shown. Hand marked ballots are subject to various interpitations by the all too human counters, and in the case of very close elections can be subject to great dispute. A correctly designed computer system offers the ability to make a positive re-affirmation as part of the vote process - push the button, and on the screen it might say "Did your REALLY want to vote for George W. Bush"?
This would make a terrific reduction in both voter error and remove pretty much all ambiguity from the process of placing a vote.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a profit margin of 16.9%.
That is not at all a high profit margin.
Coca-Cola's is around 28%; Microsoft's is 38.9%. Intel is 24.5%. General Electric, an old line commodity product company is 16.5%.
Investment analysts like the Motley Fool recommend that you do not invest in a company unless their margin is at least 10% as otherwise they will not have the ability to fund future expansion, or weather an economic recession.
It seems to me that the author makes a big deal about Brazil being such a poor nation.
Utter Hogwash.
Brazil, on an international scale is a RICH country. It has the eighth largest economy in the world, just behind Mainland China and just ahead of Canada.
The rest of the article is equally distorted - for example the claims that the pharmaceutical industry spends little on R&D at 33% of sales. THAT IS FIFTEEN TIMES THE AVERAGE IN US INDUSTRIES. The fact is that no other industry spends more on R&D than Pharma.
Then it goes on to talk about the AIDS epidemic in Africa as if it were the fault of the US Pharmaceutical companies. Baloney. If you examine the various causes of AIDS in Africa one rapidly is forced to the conclusion that they failures to control the epidemic in some areas (but not others) have nothing to do with the availability of treatments. Treatments have NOTHING to do with the spread of the disease, only how long it takes for those infected to die. It has been long known to epidemiologists that the problems with AIDS in Africa are mostly of a cultural nature. This is why AIDS is a minor problem in poor Islamic nations in the north, and a major problem in richer southern nations.
The is the worst kind of distorted journalism one can imagine because it twists the facts to the prejudices of the author. It is sickening to me to see a publication like the NYT print such a piece. It is even more sickening to me to see the readers of slashdot swallow this hook, line and sinker.
Would an American care to enlighten us non-us residents as to how these times compare to the usual delivery times of the USPS? Six to seven days is quite a long time and I just wondered whether that was usual for packaging in the US.
There are a variety of services one can choose, first class or priority mail (air) is usually 2-3 days, and is the normal method for letters and priority packages. Parcel post (which I imagine these were sent as) is essentially a ground shipment method and normally takes several days cross-country but is less expensive. Bulk or book rates are slower yet.
Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative.
Well, Shakespeare's business model was to write material that he could use to attract an audience to his playhouse.
Copyright didn't really play a part in what he was doing.
This is one of the weakest areguments I have ever heard against IP - that it interferes with the free market.
The 'Free Market' is no particular holy grail of goodness, and in fact the long history of the capitalism has shown quite clearly that an unfettered free market does NOT yield an economy that results in the best society.
A free market has no restrictions on the behaviour of corporations whatsoever. They are free to engage in price fixing, formation of monopolies, egregious treatment of employees, sale of dangerous products, false advertising, copying of their competitor's trademarks, mislabelling their products contents, and whatever forms of environmental rape that result in their greatest profit.
This argument would return us to the days of the giant monopolies of the early part of the 20th century, sale of tainted food (see Upton Sinclair), use of opiates in soft drinks, a workforce where 25% have lost body parts to unsafe machinery, and rivers that catch fire from their carriage of industrial wastes.
The free market is NECCESSARILY regulated to insure competition and control of the behaviour of corporations. Labor laws, environmental regualtions and contract law are all part of this, as is IP law.
IP laws improve the quality of our society by providing special incentives to the creation of new information - be it art,literature,music or technologies. The elimination of these incentives will impoversh us far more than the relataively small and temporary economic benefits that individuals would gain if the existing rights accrued to authors were eliminated.
'I've basically thrown away all patches sent to me so far, and I will continue to do so at least over the weekend. I'm not going to bother thinking about patches for a few days.'
The reason that Torvalds is throwing away patches is that it is his judgement that the state of the 2.4.0 kernel is such that it needs to be tested for a while so that whatever problems it might have become better understood. It's all described in the kernel mailing list, and is a perfectly normaly part of the software development process.
People who think Linus is killing Linux have no understanding of open source. If somebody thinks they can do a better job, they are perfect free to fork Linux are run with it. The fact taht such forks don't exist is a very good indication of how good a job Linus is doing.
I don't have a link, but I distinctly remember that resolution being passed.
There has been some whining about human cloning in various documents from UN agencies such as UNESCO, but I think that the UN doesn't really have the power to make anything like this illegal.
In any case, how is this really different from any other artificial method of producing an embryo using genetic material from sperm banks, donated eggs, etc.? We have many natural clones running around (identical twins) anyway. How will a few artificial ones be materially different?
Of much greater concern is genetically modified humans. THAT is something very serious - and the time is coming. I recently saw an article describing the first genetically modified primate - a monkey with a special gene that produces a flourescent dye for use in research. Now THAT is scary.
Here in the U.S., no such legal recourse exists.
Actually that is incorrect. If a company places a privacy statement in their advertising, and fails to adhere to it they become liable under US commercial codes for breaking a contract with thier customers. The FTC regularly fines companies that engage in such practices.
Isn't use of greyscale sort of cheating?
A lot of folks are speaking out against this because they don't see a need in the high tech industry - they have technology skills that are giving them a good living.
However these unions are not aiming to organize the highly skilled professional - they are aiming at the thousands of lower skilled workers in the technology industry - the customer service reps working phone banks, the warehouse workers, etc.
These are people who are often forced into very poor working conditions, sometimes with little regard for such niceties as pay above minimum wage, sick leave, and so on. If you are such a worker a union can be a positive.
Management that comes out in a aggressive manner to fight a organization makes me wonder why they feel the need. If a company is treating it's workers well, they have no incentive to organize. It's the companies that are treating their workers shoddily that get organized.
it would be bad publicity if the next version of IE was not able to run Java at all
Yes, very bad for Microsoft.
It is interesting that your "evidence" is so completely irrational.
That is a silly claim. I present facts regarding cases where it is clearly illustrated that free speech is NOT as well protected in Britain, and you try to dismiss this as irrational. Well, I think that this dismissal is in itself irrational as you have not presented any countering argument to my evidence that the legal protection of free speech in the US is greater than in Britain.
As far as speaking what you think, there is in any society a social norm as to what is considered polite, and what is considered impolite. Clearly your voicing of your prejudices against America might be considered impolite to your American hosts. Surely Americans get much criticism for voicing their views when visiting other countries. Perhaps you percieve this as lack of freedom of speech. Other people might feel that you are merely being rude and obnoxious.
In regards to your run-in with the immigration service, well, I too have had problems with petty bureacrats - in many countries. It is universal.
As far as eToy goes, that was simply a trademark dispute. As such it has NOTHING to do with censorship.
Ooh! Ooh!
No more keyboard-face.
There were a good number of laws in effect in Dunblane regulating the ownership of firearms prior to the massacre occurred. The laws were quite restrictive by US standards.
What you have now is an outright ban on handguns larger than 22 caliber, which has been in effect about 3 years. Whether or not that will stop such events remains to be seen.
In the US the courts are constantly full of people being taken to court for their opinions
This is just some figment of your imagination. The fact is that people publish uncomplementary opinions regarding companies ALL THE TIME without any such actions. Hell, if your theory were true people would be getting sued for publishing bad movie reviews. It just isn't so.
Look at the recent Firestone case - this company was dragged through the media and whipped on by the press beyond all imagination. Show me ONE instance where Firestone sued any of it's critics.
Our press have a history of freely saying what they like
Perhaps, however government censorship of the press is a lot easier in England than in the US. There is NO guarantee of freedom of the press at the level of the US in Britain.
If you don't believe my assertions regarding British libel law vs. free speech in the US, look at the case where Dr. Godfrey sued several people outside the US for libel and won, where in the US his case was thrown out for infringing on free speech. Here is some background from an article in the NYT:
Fri, 5 Jun 1998 16:44:46 -0400 (EDT)
Dr. L. Godfrey is suing Cornell university and a former Cornell grad student for libel in London complaining about messages posted by the student
(M. Dolenga) on the usenet group soc.culture.canada 3 years ago. Dr. Godfrey has previously settled a case in which he sued a British physicist and won a libel suit against an Australian ISP. He also has two other Internet defamation cases he is pursuing. The general issue here is that UK libel law often prohibits speech which in the US is protected by the
first amendment. If the usenet articles were written in the US and transmitted to the UK, which laws apply? "English Court May Test U.S. Ideals on Online Speech" -- *The New York Times* (5 Jun 1998, electronic edition)
One of the most famous cases showing the problems with British libel law was the Living Marxism suit, which prompted Noam Chomsky to come out and write "reform of libel law is crucial for British democracy" in a letter to the London Times dated March 16, 2000.
Here we have cases which CLEARLY illustrate what I am talking about - what is protected speech in the US can and DOES get you sued in other countries, including Britain.
I have about had it with people outside the US critcising the state of our freedoms when in FACT they are better than the home country of the person doing the criticising, and a little research can easily turn up factualy evidence to illustrate the truth.
British cuisine? Give me a break. In England you will find French, Italian, German, Chinease, Thai, etc. restaurants.
Travel to these other countries, and you will find NO English restaurants! British cuisine is the WORST in the world.
Fish paste sandwhiches! Pah!
Freedom can be won without giving mentally disturbed people the opportunity to go on shooting sprees when they snap
I am afraid the British found out in the case of the Dunblane massacre that laws against guns don't prevent shooting sprees.
I am sure that you know a good deal about the laws and freedoms in Britain. However I find your comments about the lack of freedoms in America ignorant.
For example:
"America has in there bill of rights stuff about free speach but if you say what you think then you get your yourself taken to court."
The actual fact is that it is much harder to bring a libel case in the US than it is in Britain. In the US public figures cannot bring libel cases unless you can prove intent to do harm by publishing facts that you knew were incorrect, which is extremely difficult. The libel standards in Britain are much lower, making it much harder to publish freely.
The fact is that the US rights to freedom of the press and freedom of speech are MUCH stronger than they are in Britain, and have been for over 200 years.
it's better on the big screen
That's fine, except most movies in the studio libraries will never be shown on the big screen again.
Movies that make 95% of what is available in theaters today look like junk.
The U.S. does this already with casette tapes.
So does Europe.
Actually audio CDRs have a special code on them, which is required for use in audio CD recorders. This is why I will never buy an audio CD recorder.
Whatever happened to the good old French policy of striking whenever something you didn't agree with was imposed?
I mean if duck hunters can go on strike (Good for the ducks I guess) because of losing some ancestral hunting rights, why shouldn't there be an even bigger response to this sort of nonsense?
There have been endless studies of exposure to non-ionizing radiation, and the fact is that there has never been a confirmend mechanism or result that has held up with time that any such radiation causes cancer.
A sample size of 118 positives and 475 negatives, along with speculation of a mechanism which itself may not actually be proven, and is only one involving growth rate, not initiation hardly looks to me to outwegh all the previous work in this field.
The United States would not be the first or by any means the only country that uses machines of this nature to count votes. Brazil, for example, uses devices not too much different from those proposed by this inititative. In fact Unisys has experience supplying this technology to several other countries.
Computers offer some real advantages compared to doing this by hand, as long election experience has shown. Hand marked ballots are subject to various interpitations by the all too human counters, and in the case of very close elections can be subject to great dispute. A correctly designed computer system offers the ability to make a positive re-affirmation as part of the vote process - push the button, and on the screen it might say "Did your REALLY want to vote for George W. Bush"?
This would make a terrific reduction in both voter error and remove pretty much all ambiguity from the process of placing a vote.
Clearly this is a La-z-boy e-cliner WITHOUT the 6 month Web TV subscription.