As a matter of fact I don't, I saw the report that the BBC World Service did on it. Sorry, but the web is not my only source for information. It isn't even my primary source.
Firstly, they can (and have in the past) impose fairly epic fine levels on companies they feel to be Not Nice People. The recent Nintendo judgement was relatively leniant.
Secondly, they can ban sales of bundled os + integrated apps within the EU by MS. And they can do it without having any impact on people like SuSE; that is in fact one of the courses already discussed by the commissioner in question.
Thirdly, they can adjudge MS' EULA's illegal under EU human rights laws. This is another remedy which has been discussed.
Basically, they can make life very hard for MS in the market from which MS derives it's larges revenues (they sell more software here than there).
All of your points are accurate. WRT the first two, however, there is no way the US could (under legal arenas) challenge an EU court ruling, and I don't think they'd be stupid enough to try. The one piece of information you didn't catch is that some four months ago, when the EU declared it's intention to pursue MS independently of the US DOJ, the State Deparmemnt immediately issued sabre-rattlings to the effect that if the EU attempted to do anything different or more realistic than the DOJ had done, the US would embark on an immediate and GDP-wide trade-war against the entire EU, covering everything from steel to immigration visas, until the EU backed off. The EUs response was to ignore them.
A certain amount of confusion about what I was actually saying seems to have entered your post, but there are a couple of points to which I can sensibly respond:
How do you un-do the current business subsidization of residential service?
... Why would you want to?
At what point do you insist that new capital investment be made?
... Why should you need to? (an example: who 'insisted' that AT&T spent capital in the 50s? No-one needed to. AT&T needed new equipment to keep their business running, so they bought it.
If you plan to replace them with little greedy phone companies with different rules, I don't think things will have improved.
I don't recall saying I planned anything. I recall saying that the infrastructure which was built by one group of companies (which were divergent elements of an earlier stat-sponsored monopoly) would not be removed from existance or service were the company that dug the holes and pulled the wires to go bust. They would still be there. They would simply be owned by a different company. That was my point, in it's entirity.
The companies that go under may be the one's currently providing the 'last mile': services for millions of americans.
Note that the companies will go under. No-one will go around digging up the fibre and copper which are already under ground. Companies that fail will have their assets bought by someone who is not failing. Control of the last-mile will move. The companies are trying to avoid corporate failure. The reason there is an argument, at a philosophical level, is not that some companies will die, but that control of the last-mile will move to companies which have a different paradigm entirely. That is what the corporates are trying to make the government fear, not the actual economics of bankruptcy for certain specific players.
I did not believe in God through most of high school and college, yet (I believe) I was a very moral person. I did not drink, did not do drugs,
It greatly concerns me that for some reason, not drinking and not using phramaceutical recreations is considered to be a part of 'moral' behaviour. Drugs have nothing whatsoever to do with morality. It can be argued that they have to do with Ethics, and it can be argued that they have to do with legality, but morality is a completely different ball game.
"Morality", "Being a moral person", describes a condition where a self-conscious entity (such as yourself) selects and/or derives (from whatever source: Holy scripture, science, peyote-induced shamanic dream, chicken-gut augurie, etc) a series of (usually interconnected) "morals", and then proceeds to guage all their actions by these morals.
It is possible to subsitute the word 'axiom' for the word 'moral' here. Let's talk systematic logic. Any logical system is entirely based on it's axioms, which must be derived. Usually from earlier axioms, sometimes from proofs (which are based on axioms). The ultimate boil-down answer to the source of axioms is 'well, it seems to work so until someone demonstrates that this axiom is unsound we'll accept it'.
Even so with morals. A great many societies have accepted the 'Let's have no killing of other people within your own tribe' axiom (no murder), and it has worked very well for them. Some societies have accepted the 'Let's have no killing of anyone at all' axiom, and it has tended to work out very badly for them (New Zealand provides some particularly good examples of this). Some societies have accepted a 'stimulants are bad' axiom, and other have accepted a 'used correctly, stimulants are a good thing, and if you use them dis-respectuflly we'll geld you' axiom. Both seem to work out, for different values of 'work out'.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that morality is not absolute, it is axiomatic. If you state that one of your accepted axioms is that stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens are bad, then the total abstinence from these substances can be called 'moral behaviour', but the arrogant assumption inherent in the flat statement "I am a moral person because I don't drink or do drugs" is just so terribly imprecise and uneducated that I couldn't let it pass.
If your friend had gone to that auction to try to buy back his property, would the LAPD have had someone planted among the bidders to run up the price?
I have to say I fail to see how this is relevant. He'd already paid for his property, it was his property. Even if the price he bought it back at was a fair market value, the LAPD would still have made a profit off selling his property. Leaving aside the fact that I already pointed out, 1) that he was in Britain and 2) that the lighters were confiscated at LAX, so *whenever* he tried to come home, he'd just lose 'em again.
...why in the hell you can still bring lighters on a plane!
Bad grammer aside, I'd like to take issue with this statement. A very close friend and colleague of mine spent the months from July to November in LA. He was supposed to have been there for several years, and had therefore taken a large number of personal posessions with him, including a 20-year collection of unusual zippo lighers, which numbered about 30. Being a carefull person, he always removes the flints before transporting them.
He is a white, professional, Englishman. His hold luggage was searched at LAX, and his 20-year collection of lighters was confiscated by the LAPD. He said 'Can I have a receipt for these, please, so that I can get them delievered to me?' They said 'No', and took 'em away.
A mutual friend tracked several of them down, around February this year; the valuable ones had been sold at a collectors auction on behalf of the LAPD. The collection was worth some 3000 dollars. And it was stolen, because 'You can't take lighters on a plane'. In hold luggage, mark you.
So I would like to dispute the statement (grammer corrected) that one can still bring lighters onto a plane.
I get so sick of hearing this. Here in America (don't know so much about how it is elsewhere) we are indoctrinated to believe a company's sole responsibility is to their shareholders. The only thing that matters is ROI for the shareholders, blah, blah, blah...
It's bullshit on a grand scale. While companies do have a responsibility to their shareholders, they also have a greater responsibility to the world at large.
Companies have precisely two responsibilities, in law: profit to their share-holders and obey any relevant legal statutes.
Law is all that matters, because ethics are not only subjective (the law is also subjective in any precedent law system) but unquantifiable, untestable and fundamentally unenforceable.
Therefore, if you want to change the corporations responsibilities, you have to change the law. QED.
Mac's exist in the movies: examine practically any film of the mid to late nineties (two examples without thinking: Mission: Impossible and The Net) and you'll see people using Macs.
And for those who might find markup too time-consuming while writing, the application LyX is an exceptionally effective front-end to LaTeX, well-designed and well-written, and ported to every free *NIX I know. Most documentation in my company is written using it, even by non-tech people.
Or, from a different pov (not necessarily mine, btw) it's about intelligent business practice. Business exists to make money. There is nothing ethical or moral about it. If a business can make more money, it is a better business.
In theory, government is meant to exist in order to impose artificial restrictions on businesses, to protect consumers from the reality stated above. In practice, the first thing businesses realised, once they got big enough, was that the best investment was in buying government.
It must also be pointed out that 'under-age' varies: Mr. Anthony appears to be American, but in (to pick but one example) the UK, a 16-year-old girl would not be under-age.
And even more bothersome is that KPNQwest also has lotsa cable running through Europe...
Point 1: Had. Past tense. Read the news.
Point 2: You seem to be confusing Qwest (the company mentioned in the article) with KPNQwest (the company which operated an European long-haul fibre network. Qwest is a western-seaboard long-haul fibre company. KPN is the national Telco for Holland. KPNQwest was an independent company which was *funded* by a KPN/Qwest joint venture to build fibre in Europe. It built lots of fibre and over-spent. In attempting to get sorted out it bought (with what? god knows) several profitable companies, including EUnet and Ebone (one of the best trans-European IP networks). Within 2 months it went bankrupt and they turned out the lights last week.
Legally, a corporation or limited company has an independent existance. The company's acts are not legally the same thing as the acts of the disparate directors.
This was the reason I mentioned the un-free nature of the music and film industries. What I was getting at is that companies do not have a responsibility to play nice. They have a responsibility to make money, and to make more money every year if possible. If circumstances and the law have placed them in a position of oligopoly, they do not have any ethical or moral responsibility to diminish their ability to make money by opening up the market. The market or the law has to force them to do it. They have enough money to own the law. And therefore...
What about the goddamn customer? It's called a free market (well, kind of free: I'm aware that the music industry is not one of the world's most free markets). But the fact remains that in a capitalist economy, the only duty of a company is to stay solvent, preferably profitable. The company does exist to serve it's shareholders or ownders. Not its customers.
This same procedure is happening in the world right now, but there is no public debate about how these laws are determined. We are often assuming that we "must" have the DMCA since it is an example of a United Nations model law about copyright.
Since when did the UN provide the form for the DMCA?
Leaving that aside; that the same proceedure is happining in the world at large is reasonable; unfortunately the United States is abstaining from the process. In order to have this kind of concensus on law, nations must recognize that the forum of many nations has authority over any single nation: they must accept the rule of the majority over their own independence. In exactly the same way as any individual in democratic society must accept the rule of the majority over their own independence. If a single entity (such as an exceptionally rich aristocrat with big resources and a big private army) does not accept that concensus, the whole process is placed at risk of a dictatorial takeover.
As with the US deciding unilaterally that while international law and the International Court is fine and should have authority over everyone else, the United States should be immune, in order to protect its sovreignty.
Intersting point. Being a historian by training I tend to forget that communism can be a spiritual or local political concept, as distinct from national/international 'Communism', which should really be Maxist, Leninit, Trotskyist or Mao-ist, plus a few other -ists thrown in for good measure.
The point of the Milgram experiments was to guage modern societies' responsiveness to authority: how likely were people to rebel against an established authority, and at what point. The experiments were carried out in a number of different cultures.
What was interesting, at the time, was that with two notable exceptions "scientists" carried more (much more) authority than the "military"; that is, in most cultures (particularly those which had experienced directly the second world war) the uniform of khakis and gold braid carried less authority than the uniform of lab coat and clipboard. This said a great deal about the changes in society during the 60s. In the other two cases, which were also the two cases in which the average subject break point was latest, the authority carried by science and the military was not differentiatable.
Milgram's experiments said some really scary things about modern social attitudes, but all that the general public got was 'A lot of Nazis were misguided or pressured'.
I concur entirely with what you've said in this article. Being 'greedy', or more usefully put, being self-interested, is a conditioned survival trait. Being communcally interested is another conditioned survival trait. The point of balance between these two (where one becomes more important than the other) is constantly shifting in response to actual stimulii. My point was that while human beings remain not entirely altruistic, Communism in it's most 'pure' form is not an economic or social possibility.
In communism, people decide to share their resources equally. In socualism, people are ordered to share their resources, in this case by the state.
This is of course why communism will never exist, because (as the previous anonymous poster said) it depends on the idea that people are not greedy. People are greedy.
In fact, the US started at least three of them. The US proposed the UN security council motion which led to the war in Korea (read history. If that is beyond you, watch M*A*S*H). The US started the war in Vietnam (the French Indochinese war was well (25 years) over before the US moved in). The US definitely started the Afghanistan war (The Russian war was long over when the US moved in). The US can be argued to have started the War on Terror, since Public Enemy No. 1 was trained and equipped by the CIA during the Directorship of George W. Bush. (Senior in this case).
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of fact I don't, I saw the report that the BBC World Service did on it. Sorry, but the web is not my only source for information. It isn't even my primary source.
~cHris
Firstly, they can (and have in the past) impose fairly epic fine levels on companies they feel to be Not Nice People. The recent Nintendo judgement was relatively leniant.
Secondly, they can ban sales of bundled os + integrated apps within the EU by MS. And they can do it without having any impact on people like SuSE; that is in fact one of the courses already discussed by the commissioner in question.
Thirdly, they can adjudge MS' EULA's illegal under EU human rights laws. This is another remedy which has been discussed.
Basically, they can make life very hard for MS in the market from which MS derives it's larges revenues (they sell more software here than there).
~cHris
All of your points are accurate. WRT the first two, however, there is no way the US could (under legal arenas) challenge an EU court ruling, and I don't think they'd be stupid enough to try. The one piece of information you didn't catch is that some four months ago, when the EU declared it's intention to pursue MS independently of the US DOJ, the State Deparmemnt immediately issued sabre-rattlings to the effect that if the EU attempted to do anything different or more realistic than the DOJ had done, the US would embark on an immediate and GDP-wide trade-war against the entire EU, covering everything from steel to immigration visas, until the EU backed off. The EUs response was to ignore them.
~cHrisA certain amount of confusion about what I was actually saying seems to have entered your post, but there are a couple of points to which I can sensibly respond:
How do you un-do the current business subsidization of residential service?
... Why would you want to?
At what point do you insist that new capital investment be made?
... Why should you need to? (an example: who 'insisted' that AT&T spent capital in the 50s? No-one needed to. AT&T needed new equipment to keep their business running, so they bought it.
If you plan to replace them with little greedy phone companies with different rules, I don't think things will have improved.
I don't recall saying I planned anything. I recall saying that the infrastructure which was built by one group of companies (which were divergent elements of an earlier stat-sponsored monopoly) would not be removed from existance or service were the company that dug the holes and pulled the wires to go bust. They would still be there. They would simply be owned by a different company. That was my point, in it's entirity.
~cHrisNote that the companies will go under. No-one will go around digging up the fibre and copper which are already under ground. Companies that fail will have their assets bought by someone who is not failing. Control of the last-mile will move. The companies are trying to avoid corporate failure. The reason there is an argument, at a philosophical level, is not that some companies will die, but that control of the last-mile will move to companies which have a different paradigm entirely. That is what the corporates are trying to make the government fear, not the actual economics of bankruptcy for certain specific players.
~cHrisWho looks after the custard?
~cHris"Morality", "Being a moral person", describes a condition where a self-conscious entity (such as yourself) selects and/or derives (from whatever source: Holy scripture, science, peyote-induced shamanic dream, chicken-gut augurie, etc) a series of (usually interconnected) "morals", and then proceeds to guage all their actions by these morals.
It is possible to subsitute the word 'axiom' for the word 'moral' here. Let's talk systematic logic. Any logical system is entirely based on it's axioms, which must be derived. Usually from earlier axioms, sometimes from proofs (which are based on axioms). The ultimate boil-down answer to the source of axioms is 'well, it seems to work so until someone demonstrates that this axiom is unsound we'll accept it'.
Even so with morals. A great many societies have accepted the 'Let's have no killing of other people within your own tribe' axiom (no murder), and it has worked very well for them. Some societies have accepted the 'Let's have no killing of anyone at all' axiom, and it has tended to work out very badly for them (New Zealand provides some particularly good examples of this). Some societies have accepted a 'stimulants are bad' axiom, and other have accepted a 'used correctly, stimulants are a good thing, and if you use them dis-respectuflly we'll geld you' axiom. Both seem to work out, for different values of 'work out'.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that morality is not absolute, it is axiomatic. If you state that one of your accepted axioms is that stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens are bad, then the total abstinence from these substances can be called 'moral behaviour', but the arrogant assumption inherent in the flat statement "I am a moral person because I don't drink or do drugs" is just so terribly imprecise and uneducated that I couldn't let it pass.
~cHrisI have to say I fail to see how this is relevant. He'd already paid for his property, it was his property. Even if the price he bought it back at was a fair market value, the LAPD would still have made a profit off selling his property. Leaving aside the fact that I already pointed out, 1) that he was in Britain and 2) that the lighters were confiscated at LAX, so *whenever* he tried to come home, he'd just lose 'em again.
~cHrisBad grammer aside, I'd like to take issue with this statement. A very close friend and colleague of mine spent the months from July to November in LA. He was supposed to have been there for several years, and had therefore taken a large number of personal posessions with him, including a 20-year collection of unusual zippo lighers, which numbered about 30. Being a carefull person, he always removes the flints before transporting them.
He is a white, professional, Englishman. His hold luggage was searched at LAX, and his 20-year collection of lighters was confiscated by the LAPD. He said 'Can I have a receipt for these, please, so that I can get them delievered to me?' They said 'No', and took 'em away.
A mutual friend tracked several of them down, around February this year; the valuable ones had been sold at a collectors auction on behalf of the LAPD. The collection was worth some 3000 dollars. And it was stolen, because 'You can't take lighters on a plane'. In hold luggage, mark you.
So I would like to dispute the statement (grammer corrected) that one can still bring lighters onto a plane.
~cHrisCompanies have precisely two responsibilities, in law: profit to their share-holders and obey any relevant legal statutes.
Law is all that matters, because ethics are not only subjective (the law is also subjective in any precedent law system) but unquantifiable, untestable and fundamentally unenforceable.
Therefore, if you want to change the corporations responsibilities, you have to change the law. QED.
~cHris
Learn the words.
Mac's exist in the movies: examine practically any film of the mid to late nineties (two examples without thinking: Mission: Impossible and The Net) and you'll see people using Macs.
~cHrisAnd for those who might find markup too time-consuming while writing, the application LyX is an exceptionally effective front-end to LaTeX, well-designed and well-written, and ported to every free *NIX I know. Most documentation in my company is written using it, even by non-tech people.
~cHrisOr, from a different pov (not necessarily mine, btw) it's about intelligent business practice. Business exists to make money. There is nothing ethical or moral about it. If a business can make more money, it is a better business.
In theory, government is meant to exist in order to impose artificial restrictions on businesses, to protect consumers from the reality stated above. In practice, the first thing businesses realised, once they got big enough, was that the best investment was in buying government.
~cHristhe Island? There's seven, isn't there?
~cHrisIt must also be pointed out that 'under-age' varies: Mr. Anthony appears to be American, but in (to pick but one example) the UK, a 16-year-old girl would not be under-age.
~cHrisPoint 1: Had. Past tense. Read the news.
Point 2: You seem to be confusing Qwest (the company mentioned in the article) with KPNQwest (the company which operated an European long-haul fibre network. Qwest is a western-seaboard long-haul fibre company. KPN is the national Telco for Holland. KPNQwest was an independent company which was *funded* by a KPN/Qwest joint venture to build fibre in Europe. It built lots of fibre and over-spent. In attempting to get sorted out it bought (with what? god knows) several profitable companies, including EUnet and Ebone (one of the best trans-European IP networks). Within 2 months it went bankrupt and they turned out the lights last week.
HTH. HAND.
~cHrisLegally, a corporation or limited company has an independent existance. The company's acts are not legally the same thing as the acts of the disparate directors.
~cHrisThis was the reason I mentioned the un-free nature of the music and film industries. What I was getting at is that companies do not have a responsibility to play nice. They have a responsibility to make money, and to make more money every year if possible. If circumstances and the law have placed them in a position of oligopoly, they do not have any ethical or moral responsibility to diminish their ability to make money by opening up the market. The market or the law has to force them to do it. They have enough money to own the law. And therefore ...
~cHrisWhat about the goddamn customer? It's called a free market (well, kind of free: I'm aware that the music industry is not one of the world's most free markets). But the fact remains that in a capitalist economy, the only duty of a company is to stay solvent, preferably profitable. The company does exist to serve it's shareholders or ownders. Not its customers.
~cHrisSince when did the UN provide the form for the DMCA?
Leaving that aside; that the same proceedure is happining in the world at large is reasonable; unfortunately the United States is abstaining from the process. In order to have this kind of concensus on law, nations must recognize that the forum of many nations has authority over any single nation: they must accept the rule of the majority over their own independence. In exactly the same way as any individual in democratic society must accept the rule of the majority over their own independence. If a single entity (such as an exceptionally rich aristocrat with big resources and a big private army) does not accept that concensus, the whole process is placed at risk of a dictatorial takeover.
As with the US deciding unilaterally that while international law and the International Court is fine and should have authority over everyone else, the United States should be immune, in order to protect its sovreignty.
~cHrisIntersting point. Being a historian by training I tend to forget that communism can be a spiritual or local political concept, as distinct from national/international 'Communism', which should really be Maxist, Leninit, Trotskyist or Mao-ist, plus a few other -ists thrown in for good measure.
~cHrisThe point of the Milgram experiments was to guage modern societies' responsiveness to authority: how likely were people to rebel against an established authority, and at what point. The experiments were carried out in a number of different cultures.
What was interesting, at the time, was that with two notable exceptions "scientists" carried more (much more) authority than the "military"; that is, in most cultures (particularly those which had experienced directly the second world war) the uniform of khakis and gold braid carried less authority than the uniform of lab coat and clipboard. This said a great deal about the changes in society during the 60s. In the other two cases, which were also the two cases in which the average subject break point was latest, the authority carried by science and the military was not differentiatable.
Milgram's experiments said some really scary things about modern social attitudes, but all that the general public got was 'A lot of Nazis were misguided or pressured'.
~cHrisI concur entirely with what you've said in this article. Being 'greedy', or more usefully put, being self-interested, is a conditioned survival trait. Being communcally interested is another conditioned survival trait. The point of balance between these two (where one becomes more important than the other) is constantly shifting in response to actual stimulii. My point was that while human beings remain not entirely altruistic, Communism in it's most 'pure' form is not an economic or social possibility.
~cHrisIn communism, people decide to share their resources equally. In socualism, people are ordered to share their resources, in this case by the state.
This is of course why communism will never exist, because (as the previous anonymous poster said) it depends on the idea that people are not greedy. People are greedy.
~cHrisIn fact, the US started at least three of them. The US proposed the UN security council motion which led to the war in Korea (read history. If that is beyond you, watch M*A*S*H). The US started the war in Vietnam (the French Indochinese war was well (25 years) over before the US moved in). The US definitely started the Afghanistan war (The Russian war was long over when the US moved in). The US can be argued to have started the War on Terror, since Public Enemy No. 1 was trained and equipped by the CIA during the Directorship of George W. Bush. (Senior in this case).
~cHris