Chomsky always points out that it's the corporate SYSTEM that causes things to happen they way they do, and it's often not due to evil people.
The system is run by people, it does nothing by itself. Susie Q in lowest layer accounting spotting a discrepancy of billions of dollars in the company's accounts and decides to keep quiet to protect his job? John Hancock in sales promising the moon to a potential client to get that commission? Maybe it's the CEO, deciding to cut loose all of R&D to cut costs?
Ah, but it's all about the money, right? Then it's the investors, choosing money over responsible corporate governance. After all, the voting investors set the overall course of the ship. Or maybe it's the founders for chartering the behemoth in the first place?
At every step, the choices are made by a human being in charge of their own destiny. The system is perfectly fine, the problem is that the people running it suck.
Yes, you say 9k troops were on the ground within 24 hours.
Of that 9k troops that arrived on "the scene", a whopping 250 of them or so were assigned to NO. The rest were spread out over the entire Louisiana and Mississippi coastline and well onto land. Ignore the original poster's spin, the whole article he plagarized is useless.
Once upon a time the Louisiana National Guard had amphibious personnel carriers. I guess the magic armor fairy went around making them disappear, since those were probably not in Iraq and they certainly failed to make an appearance in the submerged parts of New Orleans.
OK, I know you're up on your high horse and probably chanting that people shouldn't live where hurricanes have hit, and you've probably never even seen a hurricane in your life or had to use one of those fancy tracking charts you seem to like to wave around there.
It's very easy to check where Katrina was 5 days ago and it was in the Gulf of Mexico.
The CENTER of the storm was in the Gulf of Mexico. Do you understand what that means? Maybe you should take some time out and look and see what a hurricane looks like.
Scroll down there, to that one picture of the hurricane stretching from Central America to Florida. Now, tell me again just where exactly the hurricane was 5 days ago?
What it means is that while there are terrible disasters that no-one should ever face, the rest of the world doesn't stop for them, and there are still other people in crisis situations around the world that still need help despite what other problems people are facing.
How would you like it if you were on top of a roof in New Orleans, and a guy in a helicoptor lowered a rope down to you and just as you were about to grab on, they raised it and flew off to save some tsunami victims somewhere else?
ensure that those 5 barrels will be used wisely, because the ones who need the barrels the most will be the ones willing to pay the most.
Sorry, I think you mean they'll be used in some CEO's speedboat, because the cost has NOTHING to do with how "wise" the person buying it is, only how much money they are capable of spending on it.
Note that what we're arguing over isn't "artificially low prices" it's lying about the scarcity in order to raise the so-called actual price, while in actuality there is plenty to go around at the normal price, and hey, you can even restock at the normal price too!
Do you actually believe in a free market? Or do you just have wet dreams about making millions of dollars as you walk over the bodies of anyone in your way? Do you really just want a "free market" where the government can't interfere, but the people are simply kept in the dark and forced to make buying decisions based on lies and misinformation?
Pretend that gas supply gets cut... oh, lets say 10% and you'll have to pay... oh, say 150% more than the $1 you used to pay, ok? So what do you do, raise prices 150%? 300%? 1000%?
Unfortunately, no matter what I charge I'll never make more than two cents/gallon profit
Huh? You mean the station across the street isn't going to race you to 1000%? If only the world was as magnanimous as you were, kind sir. Oh right! Someone would magically show up and undercut you, forcing you to lower prices! Just as soon as they finished buying some land, digging holes in the ground, installing some tanks and pumps and hiring people to run the place (and since we're pretending that we live in libertarian heaven, I left out the whole government thing with the permits and inspections and what not).
If the anti-gouging laws are keeping you from covering your costs and making a profit, they are broken in every sense of the word. If they are keeping you from putting 90 of your generators in the back room, putting up a big sign and selling the "last 10 generators in the city" for $10,000 each, then they're doing their job admirably.
They may be asking that Google and Lee honor that agreement, but that's not what they're talking about in their lawsuit:
But near the end of Microsoft's initial complaint, the company accuses Lee of violating nondisclosure provisions in his contract. In doing so, the software giant calls on the inevitable disclosure theory
Seems to be a pretty popular tactic these days, to publically say one thing while litigating something different. Works pretty well when what you're saying and what you're suing are close enough together that you have to look closely to see the difference.
I'm sure that in Microsoft's case what they say is the truth: they really don't want Lee working for Google for a year, and if Google fires him, it all goes away. But by bringing IP law into the mix, they're dragging in a whole new dimension that is probably not covered by the contract. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I am sure the noncompete doesn't say "at the end of one year the undersigned is free to use our copyrighted material and our trade secrets for the benefit of our competitors. Good luck, Godspeed, and may the Force be with you." Unlike short term noncompete agreements and even copyrights, trade secrets don't expire until they're no longer secret (and with decss we see that the legal definition of secret has little in relation to reality). So in reality, when Microsoft's lawyer argues that disclosure is "inevitable", they're talking "now to infinity", not "oh, it's ok after a year".
I remember when the Gameboy came out oh so many years ago and we all rushed to the store to grab one. It just doesn't seem like people are that excited about having one more handheld device to carry around.
Same here. I just had to have one to play in the back of the van on those oh-so-long road trips and vacations.
Now? Now I'm the one driving, the only time I have to play games is at home!
We're just not the target audience for handhelds anymore, and both sony and nintendo would be wise to remember that
One of the basic rules of economics is that product cost is determined only by supply and demand.
It's also the most often broken rule. Try buying a house someday, especially after a real estate bubble bursts. How many years after the dotcom collapse did it take for apartment and housing prices in the silicon valley to adjust? These people are more than happy to stay where they are if they can't get the price they want, and empty apartment units are cheap to maintain without anyone breaking the AC or the plumbing.
Look, at least try to keep up here. Google already knew about the contract and planned for it: the man was going to be "on leave" for the year of the non-compete agreement. They basically hired the guy to do nothing at all, thereby not competing with Microsoft at all. This is, in fact, standard operating procedure when dealing with someone with such a contract but which HR has identified as someone they really, really want to employ.
Microsoft's lawsuit is no longer about the contract, it's about their "trade secrets", and they're claiming that "some time in the future" (aka now to infinity) Lee will leak their trade secrets and can therefore not work for Google, not now or ever, contract or no contract.
this was his choice when he signed on at Microsoft and signed the non-compete claus.
Which is what the contract says, but is not what the lawsuit says. Trade secrets have no expiration date other than when they become widely known. If Microsoft successfully pursues this line of thought, the man may never be able to get a job in any field Microsoft has dabbled in (which is what, all of them? Maybe he could go work on matlab or something).
As to my knowledge, there are school bus stops arranged at the stop signs of for the public school buses, a route based on that nullifies the second half of your response.
I've lived in several places, and not one of them ever had any kind of dedicated school bus stops. As a child I was bussed 30 minutes to school from the middle of nowhere, and the only reason the bus continued down the road from my house was because the only way for it to turn around was for it to get to the big meadow at the end of it. If there were no kids on the road, it wouldn't have even gotten on to that rut.
By High School, I moved to a city and lived in a subdivision, and bussing was certainly a hot topic. Lines were drawn: if you lived inside oddly-shaped-section A, you went to elementary at A1, you went to middle school at A2 and highschool at A3. Busses went everywhere within A. If you lived in misshapen-polygon B, you did not go to school at A3, unless your parents drove you yourself (and you had a good excuse for enrolling... family member, staying in the school after parents move, lines redrawn that put your kids in a new school etc). Everyone wanted to go to A3, so lines for picking up and dropping off kids were long, and for the seniors, several large parking lots (I graduated in a class of over 1500).
In the first case, students not getting on the bus would have led to a shorter bus route. In the latter, the bus route marked territory, and the bus probably would have still followed that route even if there were no kids to pick up at the edges.
...is the kids who were home schooled typically lack social skills.
That's why you take your kids to the park on weekends or in the summer where they can play with other kids their age. That's why you find other home schoolers in the area for them to work on projects with. That's why you enroll your kid in karate or gymnastics or any other group activity.
If you're just pulling the kid out of school and letting them lay around the house on their own, you're as half-assed as the public school system you ditched.
The question is whether the young upstarts who have built a hugely profitable business on Google's anti-corporate image are on the way to following Gates's path from bright young turk to monopolistic behemoth.
Sure it's possible. It's also possible that they'll become a gentle giant, and that's the outcome I'm rooting for.
When they start threatening computer makers for letting the users go to any search engine other than theirs, then we can start worrying about the "monopolistic behemoth".
> N You go north. You are in a dark alleyway in Lag Central. Trash litters the ground. There is a trashcan here. There is a small lag beast here. There is a small lag beast here. The King of Lag is here.Oh Shit
ABCD
The King of Lag attacks! The King of Lag's bite hurts you! EFGcome on, come on
The King of Lag's bite wounds you! The small lag beast attacks! The small lag beast's bite taps you! HIJKhurry!
The King of Lag's bite wounds you! The small lag beast attacks! The small lag beast's bite taps you! The small lag beast's bite scratches you! LMNOno! Arrr faster! The small lag beast's bite bounces off your armor! The small lag beast's bite scratches you! The King of Lag's bite CREAMS you! PQRalmost! The small lag beast's bite scratches you! S!made it! Barely... > S You go south. You leave a trail of blood behind you. A small lag beast arrives from the North. A small lag beast attacks! The small lag beast's bite scratches you! You have been killed by the small lag beast. Nooooooo!
Actually, with mirroring and a system that can be brought up/down whenever, mirrored raid can be used for backups: you can shut down, swap out a drive, and be holding a copy of the entire drive in your hand (takes a while to remirror the new drive though, but many systems can do this while the computer is running, just a lot slower). Whether that is a great way to take backups or not is a different issue.
You're right on that in general... our tort system is all stick and no carrot, and a whipped dog will simply work harder to hide from its master.
However, Merck's Vioxx case isn't the one to tout as an example. The $229 million punitive damages award in the Texas case was specifically awarded (even though it's in execess of the legal maximum and will be reduced) because a Merck memo showed that someone estimated that delaying four months before updating the package material to warn users of the heart attack risk would allow them to earn $229 million more dollars.
This article is pretty interesting. It puts forth the idea that tort is "privatized justice". When the government failed to punish Merck, lawyers took up the slack. The author paints a concept where someone will be around to punish evildoers, and if the government doesn't want lawyers to step up to the plate, then they need to work harder to do the jobs themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Chomsky always points out that it's the corporate SYSTEM that causes things to happen they way they do, and it's often not due to evil people.
The system is run by people, it does nothing by itself. Susie Q in lowest layer accounting spotting a discrepancy of billions of dollars in the company's accounts and decides to keep quiet to protect his job? John Hancock in sales promising the moon to a potential client to get that commission? Maybe it's the CEO, deciding to cut loose all of R&D to cut costs?
Ah, but it's all about the money, right? Then it's the investors, choosing money over responsible corporate governance. After all, the voting investors set the overall course of the ship. Or maybe it's the founders for chartering the behemoth in the first place?
At every step, the choices are made by a human being in charge of their own destiny. The system is perfectly fine, the problem is that the people running it suck.
Yes, you say 9k troops were on the ground within 24 hours.
Of that 9k troops that arrived on "the scene", a whopping 250 of them or so were assigned to NO. The rest were spread out over the entire Louisiana and Mississippi coastline and well onto land. Ignore the original poster's spin, the whole article he plagarized is useless.
This is what everyone should really be doing. And that was published on August 16th.
Once upon a time the Louisiana National Guard had amphibious personnel carriers. I guess the magic armor fairy went around making them disappear, since those were probably not in Iraq and they certainly failed to make an appearance in the submerged parts of New Orleans.
At least he had the honesty to cite his source.
OK, I know you're up on your high horse and probably chanting that people shouldn't live where hurricanes have hit, and you've probably never even seen a hurricane in your life or had to use one of those fancy tracking charts you seem to like to wave around there.
It's very easy to check where Katrina was 5 days ago and it was in the Gulf of Mexico.
The CENTER of the storm was in the Gulf of Mexico. Do you understand what that means? Maybe you should take some time out and look and see what a hurricane looks like.
Scroll down there, to that one picture of the hurricane stretching from Central America to Florida. Now, tell me again just where exactly the hurricane was 5 days ago?
What it means is that while there are terrible disasters that no-one should ever face, the rest of the world doesn't stop for them, and there are still other people in crisis situations around the world that still need help despite what other problems people are facing.
How would you like it if you were on top of a roof in New Orleans, and a guy in a helicoptor lowered a rope down to you and just as you were about to grab on, they raised it and flew off to save some tsunami victims somewhere else?
ensure that those 5 barrels will be used wisely, because the ones who need the barrels the most will be the ones willing to pay the most.
Sorry, I think you mean they'll be used in some CEO's speedboat, because the cost has NOTHING to do with how "wise" the person buying it is, only how much money they are capable of spending on it.
Note that what we're arguing over isn't "artificially low prices" it's lying about the scarcity in order to raise the so-called actual price, while in actuality there is plenty to go around at the normal price, and hey, you can even restock at the normal price too!
Do you actually believe in a free market? Or do you just have wet dreams about making millions of dollars as you walk over the bodies of anyone in your way? Do you really just want a "free market" where the government can't interfere, but the people are simply kept in the dark and forced to make buying decisions based on lies and misinformation?
Oooh! Yes! Let's play pretend!
Pretend that gas supply gets cut... oh, lets say 10% and you'll have to pay... oh, say 150% more than the $1 you used to pay, ok? So what do you do, raise prices 150%? 300%? 1000%?
Unfortunately, no matter what I charge I'll never make more than two cents/gallon profit
Huh? You mean the station across the street isn't going to race you to 1000%? If only the world was as magnanimous as you were, kind sir. Oh right! Someone would magically show up and undercut you, forcing you to lower prices! Just as soon as they finished buying some land, digging holes in the ground, installing some tanks and pumps and hiring people to run the place (and since we're pretending that we live in libertarian heaven, I left out the whole government thing with the permits and inspections and what not).
If the anti-gouging laws are keeping you from covering your costs and making a profit, they are broken in every sense of the word. If they are keeping you from putting 90 of your generators in the back room, putting up a big sign and selling the "last 10 generators in the city" for $10,000 each, then they're doing their job admirably.
They may be asking that Google and Lee honor that agreement, but that's not what they're talking about in their lawsuit:
But near the end of Microsoft's initial complaint, the company accuses Lee of violating nondisclosure provisions in his contract. In doing so, the software giant calls on the inevitable disclosure theory
Seems to be a pretty popular tactic these days, to publically say one thing while litigating something different. Works pretty well when what you're saying and what you're suing are close enough together that you have to look closely to see the difference.
I'm sure that in Microsoft's case what they say is the truth: they really don't want Lee working for Google for a year, and if Google fires him, it all goes away. But by bringing IP law into the mix, they're dragging in a whole new dimension that is probably not covered by the contract. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I am sure the noncompete doesn't say "at the end of one year the undersigned is free to use our copyrighted material and our trade secrets for the benefit of our competitors. Good luck, Godspeed, and may the Force be with you." Unlike short term noncompete agreements and even copyrights, trade secrets don't expire until they're no longer secret (and with decss we see that the legal definition of secret has little in relation to reality). So in reality, when Microsoft's lawyer argues that disclosure is "inevitable", they're talking "now to infinity", not "oh, it's ok after a year".
I remember when the Gameboy came out oh so many years ago and we all rushed to the store to grab one. It just doesn't seem like people are that excited about having one more handheld device to carry around.
Same here. I just had to have one to play in the back of the van on those oh-so-long road trips and vacations.
Now? Now I'm the one driving, the only time I have to play games is at home!
We're just not the target audience for handhelds anymore, and both sony and nintendo would be wise to remember that
One of the basic rules of economics is that product cost is determined only by supply and demand.
It's also the most often broken rule. Try buying a house someday, especially after a real estate bubble bursts. How many years after the dotcom collapse did it take for apartment and housing prices in the silicon valley to adjust? These people are more than happy to stay where they are if they can't get the price they want, and empty apartment units are cheap to maintain without anyone breaking the AC or the plumbing.
Man, the 1980's just loves to screw up words, don't they? After all, that decade is what happened to our beloved "hacker" as well.
blah blah blah contract blah blah
Look, at least try to keep up here. Google already knew about the contract and planned for it: the man was going to be "on leave" for the year of the non-compete agreement. They basically hired the guy to do nothing at all, thereby not competing with Microsoft at all. This is, in fact, standard operating procedure when dealing with someone with such a contract but which HR has identified as someone they really, really want to employ.
Microsoft's lawsuit is no longer about the contract, it's about their "trade secrets", and they're claiming that "some time in the future" (aka now to infinity) Lee will leak their trade secrets and can therefore not work for Google, not now or ever, contract or no contract.
this was his choice when he signed on at Microsoft and signed the non-compete claus.
Which is what the contract says, but is not what the lawsuit says. Trade secrets have no expiration date other than when they become widely known. If Microsoft successfully pursues this line of thought, the man may never be able to get a job in any field Microsoft has dabbled in (which is what, all of them? Maybe he could go work on matlab or something).
As to my knowledge, there are school bus stops arranged at the stop signs of for the public school buses, a route based on that nullifies the second half of your response.
I've lived in several places, and not one of them ever had any kind of dedicated school bus stops. As a child I was bussed 30 minutes to school from the middle of nowhere, and the only reason the bus continued down the road from my house was because the only way for it to turn around was for it to get to the big meadow at the end of it. If there were no kids on the road, it wouldn't have even gotten on to that rut.
By High School, I moved to a city and lived in a subdivision, and bussing was certainly a hot topic. Lines were drawn: if you lived inside oddly-shaped-section A, you went to elementary at A1, you went to middle school at A2 and highschool at A3. Busses went everywhere within A. If you lived in misshapen-polygon B, you did not go to school at A3, unless your parents drove you yourself (and you had a good excuse for enrolling... family member, staying in the school after parents move, lines redrawn that put your kids in a new school etc). Everyone wanted to go to A3, so lines for picking up and dropping off kids were long, and for the seniors, several large parking lots (I graduated in a class of over 1500).
In the first case, students not getting on the bus would have led to a shorter bus route. In the latter, the bus route marked territory, and the bus probably would have still followed that route even if there were no kids to pick up at the edges.
That's why you take your kids to the park on weekends or in the summer where they can play with other kids their age. That's why you find other home schoolers in the area for them to work on projects with. That's why you enroll your kid in karate or gymnastics or any other group activity.
If you're just pulling the kid out of school and letting them lay around the house on their own, you're as half-assed as the public school system you ditched.
Is the answer to start taxing the tenants of apartment complexes
Presumably the landlord is taxed, and in turn sets the prices of the units to get that money back.
The question is whether the young upstarts who have built a hugely profitable business on Google's anti-corporate image are on the way to following Gates's path from bright young turk to monopolistic behemoth.
Sure it's possible. It's also possible that they'll become a gentle giant, and that's the outcome I'm rooting for.
When they start threatening computer makers for letting the users go to any search engine other than theirs, then we can start worrying about the "monopolistic behemoth".
> N
You go north.
You are in a dark alleyway in Lag Central. Trash litters the ground. There is a trashcan here.
There is a small lag beast here.
There is a small lag beast here.
The King of Lag is here.Oh Shit
ABCD
The King of Lag attacks!
The King of Lag's bite hurts you!
EFGcome on, come on
The King of Lag's bite wounds you!
The small lag beast attacks!
The small lag beast's bite taps you!
HIJKhurry!
The King of Lag's bite wounds you!
The small lag beast attacks!
The small lag beast's bite taps you!
The small lag beast's bite scratches you!
LMNOno! Arrr faster!
The small lag beast's bite bounces off your armor!
The small lag beast's bite scratches you!
The King of Lag's bite CREAMS you!
PQRalmost!
The small lag beast's bite scratches you!
S! made it! Barely...
> S
You go south. You leave a trail of blood behind you.
A small lag beast arrives from the North.
A small lag beast attacks!
The small lag beast's bite scratches you!
You have been killed by the small lag beast.
Nooooooo!
He is your manager, somebody hired him.
;)
Well, this is a family owned business, so he may not have been hired, he may have just married into the business.
Personally, I'd ask if there were any other available daughters
Actually, with mirroring and a system that can be brought up/down whenever, mirrored raid can be used for backups: you can shut down, swap out a drive, and be holding a copy of the entire drive in your hand (takes a while to remirror the new drive though, but many systems can do this while the computer is running, just a lot slower). Whether that is a great way to take backups or not is a different issue.
You're right on that in general... our tort system is all stick and no carrot, and a whipped dog will simply work harder to hide from its master.
However, Merck's Vioxx case isn't the one to tout as an example. The $229 million punitive damages award in the Texas case was specifically awarded (even though it's in execess of the legal maximum and will be reduced) because a Merck memo showed that someone estimated that delaying four months before updating the package material to warn users of the heart attack risk would allow them to earn $229 million more dollars.
This article is pretty interesting. It puts forth the idea that tort is "privatized justice". When the government failed to punish Merck, lawyers took up the slack. The author paints a concept where someone will be around to punish evildoers, and if the government doesn't want lawyers to step up to the plate, then they need to work harder to do the jobs themselves.
The First Amendment is what protects freedom to receive information, the Second Amendment has to do with militiae and guns.
If the government wants to come and burn my books, they're going to have a firefight on their hands.