I appreciate your responses and your commitment to your principles. I also understand the necessity of having a job... everything's a tradeoff.
Also for the record: IF CEO's couldn't use corporations to wield political power, it would be a non issue for me. Sadly we don't live in that world.
I definitely respect this, but I don't think anyone is making that charge... and given the general attitude of the population, if Eich were to attempt to do something like that, I don't think it would get very far without a huge outcry. Politicians have the same problem, which is why I support the idea of term limits, because there are far too many ways that incumbent politicians have unfair advantages over challengers... even if the candidate is not explicitly trying to utilize his office for an electoral advantage... and let's face it, most politicians aren't moral enough not to do that.
As long as marriage is a government contract it deserves equal protection under the law regardless of gender. The solution (as alluded to by the OP) is to remove all government recognition of marriage for everyone and return it to a church based institution with no meaning outside the church. As long as it remains a government institution, anyone that desires to use it's automatic facilities should be able to regardless of gender.
That might be the only solution that would be equitable to all parties.
Obama was opposed to Prop 8 because he felt a ban on gay marriage should not be enshrined in a constitution.
Thanks for pointing that out. That's an important distinction from simply being opposed to extending marriage to same-sex couples. Perhaps it was calculating, but nonetheless it helps clarify the President's position at the time.
Here's another question. Assuming you support the boycott, if you worked for Mozilla and Eich were selected, would you feel it is necessary to resign your job? If not, why not? If so, and if you work for a company, have you evaluated whether or not its CEO contributed to Proposition 8 or something similar? If not, then are you remiss in your moral and political duty? If so, then how long until you are living out in a shack in the woods? I figured out a long time ago that if I boycotted every company that took a stand I disagreed with, I wouldn't be able to do business with any large company. Obviously, you can't just throw up your hands and give up, but I really think this boycott is more likely to be counterproductive than not. However, that's just my opinion... and I have no problems with what Eich did. YMMV.
Th problem is that he's tried to play all sides of the issue, and I imagine this was pretty transparent to all but the thickest voters. The states' right approach would be pretty reasonable in my view, except for the complication in this specific instance that states are required to honor contracts from other states. Nonetheless, it is the stand that I think passes muster with the Constitution and common sense.
It's certainly their right. I honestly don't think boycotts accomplish much, and as I've stated elsewhere, there are plenty of reasons to believe this boycott works _against_ the cause that it claims to support.
I think it's perfectly appropriate to being the President into it because he, at the time, held the exact same position on marriage, and he was very explicit and unequivocal about it. But no one is boycotting him for it, because he got elected twice. He's now changed his tune (which should have surprised no one), but in the intervening time, he was pretty much given a pass... probably because no one really took his claims seriously. Nonetheless, the GP's post was exactly right. When do you stop boycotting?
I sincerely believe Microsoft has done a lot of evil as a company, but I still use some of their products. Pretty much any big company, if you choose to look, will support some cause or belief that you will disagree with. Should you boycott all of them? Even if we back away relegating ourselves to living as hermits in our shacks in the woods and writing incoherent screeds against modern life, does this boycott even make sense?
I have nothing against the idea of speaking out against Eich, if you don't like what's he's done, in fact, you should. But assuming your boycott has a financial effect on the company... consider this: How many employees of Mozilla contributed _towards_ the cause of gay marriage? Does it matter? Has anyone asked that question? If Mozilla, as a group of people, is a net gain for a cause that is orthogonal to its purpose (which is to make software), and in this case, it's is quite likely, does it make sense to boycott it for a cause for which it has a net positive effect? Is it fair to punish all employees of the company, who did not have a choice in the selection of the CEO, for actions that the CEO took which have absolutely nothing to do with his role as an employee of that company? Is it responsible to boycott Mozilla unless you are sure that its existence as a company is actually harming the cause for which you stand? How could you ever even know?
When did marriage become a basic human right? Why is the government involved pro or con with it to begin with? Why is it only limited to two people?
The government originally became involved in marriage because the family is the building block of society and assisting in the foundation of stable families helps society function well. Now that marriage is seen as being all about and only about the people being married, and them being able to be labelled as such, that is no longer the case. Except prohibitions against polyamory to be next on the chopping block. People are already lining up. This is not about the ability to live your life the way you want.. because no one is preventing that now (and even where that is the case, the laws are being rapidly changed to fix that). It's now about having the ability to be validated by society. As the law traditionally stands, no one's rights are being violated, society just acknowledges that its social and biological bases are a net positive. There are already many, many prohibitions with respect to marriage: You cannot marry a relative, you cannot marry a child, you cannot marry more than one person at a time, and yet every one of these prevents people from living the life they want to live... and for good reasons, most of which also stem from the fact that these kinds of "marriages" are completely orthogonal to propagation of the race, and some are harmful in other ways as well. But it goes beyond that. Marriage is recognized and given a special status because it is the means by which society propagates itself, otherwise it's no different than a two-member club, and we all have the Constitutional right of free association.
The question I have is this: If any two people are able to declare one another as legal heirs to property, hospital visiting rights, joint tax returns, etc., what rights are being deprived if such a status is not called a "marriage"?
Obama stated explicitly that he believed that marriage is between a man and a woman, period. I guess it's a sign of my cynicism that I didn't believe for a second he meant it, only that he calculated that was the position to take at the time that would benefit him the most.
It's funny. I first registered a./ account back around 2001 to complain about the lame April Fool's Day stories. If they are taking it easy, it's about time.
Why not? Established society has lots of problems. Here's a chance to try it again from scratch. Maybe they'll get it better. Maybe they won't. But maybe _our_ society will get better and maybe it won't. Either way, we have a lot of history to learn from... if we can.
Seems pretty obvious then, that the state of Oregon is incompetent and are to be blamed for contracting with company that is so widely known to be arrogant, evil, and incompetent.
Precisely. How does Oracle continue to be successful with the reputation they have?
Then why do you work with them? And more to the point, why did Oregon hire such a shitty company to work on a mission critical product? Who's fault is this, really?
As was stated elsewhere, because no one else successfully bid for the project.
There's plenty of blame to go around when Oracle was the only company unscrupulous enough to pretend they could honor the requirements of the contract.
Call me naive, but I would have thought by now that some of this known behavior by clients would have been worked into contract language that more or less "forces" clients to make decisions, accept the outcomes of scope increases, etc?
If 99% of America hadn't collectively forgotten how to manage anything bigger than a lemonade stand, you'd be right. The problem isn't that these projects are badly managed by both the client and contractor... the real problem is that everything is badly managed by almost everybody. We might be making huge leaps in terms of technology, but in terms of the ability to manage large complex operations, especially in the still relatively new technology industry, we are going backwards. Look at any big software company and the tremendous pool of talent they have working for them and compare it to the usually shoddy, lackluster results. Oracle is a perfect example, but almost any tech company will suffice.
At a certain point, "refusing to articulate "business requirements" effectively and repeatedly increasing the scope of the project" becomes the primary reason for project failure.
And knowing that this problem is endemic among government contracts is one reason why the whole idea of Obamacare should have been rejected out of hand from Day One. Complain all you want about how horrible private insurance companies are to deal with (and they are), but at some point they need to provide some value or they will go out of business. The Federal government is under no such constraint. There is no penalty for failure, except to trade one incompetent political party for the other every 4 or 8 years. The lifers in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy carry on in perpetuity, and the contractors always make out like bandits.
> That's just one of the reasons - contractors are corporate scapegoats for hire. But they're also hired so that they can grease the decision makers with kickbacks.
Of course, don't forget that contractors more often than not earn the blame they get.
Anyone who has dealt with Oracle knows this. They have all the arrogance, evil and incompetence of Microsoft, except Microsoft at least attempts to make software people can actually use. Oracle's attitude is that if someone, somewhere, with no limit to the amount of effort, headache and voodoo required, can make it work, then it's good enough to ship.
Well, in this case VBA was necessary because it was a full-blown data entry Order Form GUI with a lot of complexity. Yes, everyone involved realized that Excel was not the best way to go about doing this, because I never failed to remind them, but it was chosen for a lot of other reasons. That said, despite the pain, and the ridiculous lengths I had to go through to make sure it worked for everyone* (despite them all having the same version of Office 2010 running on either XP or Windows 7), the end result was pretty slick.
At one point I took advantage of the DataTime picker control, because it's really useful, and it seemed safe because it was one of the standard Windows controls that was introduced in the days of Windows 95, approximately 16 years earlier at the time. How could it not be a standard component? Well, it turned out (apparently depending on what _non-Microsoft_ software was also installed on the computer) the app wouldn't run for some people even though they all had the same version of Excel 2010. Including some kind of installer was out of the questions (and obviated one of the few advantages of using Excel in the first place). I ended up having to remove it. Needless to say, it was one of the many, many ways that OLE completely failed to live up to any of the promises that were made about it.
Back in the late 70s/early 80s I figured out a series of rotations that would rotate only 4 center-edge cubes that was very useful in solving the puzzle, but it was incredibly unwieldly, requiring dozens of rotations. I could usually do the whole thing in about 15 minutes. That was good enough for me...
We may be *finally* seeing an end to Microsoft's abusive stranglehold on the industry.
Yes, but the possibility that they will simply be replaced by another company's abusive strangehold (*cough*Google*cough*) is too high. I want Microsoft to fail. They deserve to fail. I literally believe Microsoft is the biggest roadblock holding back technology today. However, I still want them to be around and influential enough to keep Google or Apple or Amazon or Oracle or whoever else from becoming the same thing.
Plus, now that they finally have a new CEO, they might change their tune and stop being such a boat anchor on the industry. Yes, I don't expect them to stop being evil, but maybe they can avoid delivering another Vista or Windows 8 in favor of products like XP and Windows 7, which despite their flaws, are at least not always blatantly hostile to the customer's wants and needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate your responses and your commitment to your principles. I also understand the necessity of having a job... everything's a tradeoff.
Also for the record: IF CEO's couldn't use corporations to wield political power, it would be a non issue for me. Sadly we don't live in that world.
I definitely respect this, but I don't think anyone is making that charge... and given the general attitude of the population, if Eich were to attempt to do something like that, I don't think it would get very far without a huge outcry. Politicians have the same problem, which is why I support the idea of term limits, because there are far too many ways that incumbent politicians have unfair advantages over challengers... even if the candidate is not explicitly trying to utilize his office for an electoral advantage... and let's face it, most politicians aren't moral enough not to do that.
As long as marriage is a government contract it deserves equal protection under the law regardless of gender. The solution (as alluded to by the OP) is to remove all government recognition of marriage for everyone and return it to a church based institution with no meaning outside the church. As long as it remains a government institution, anyone that desires to use it's automatic facilities should be able to regardless of gender.
That might be the only solution that would be equitable to all parties.
Obama was opposed to Prop 8 because he felt a ban on gay marriage should not be enshrined in a constitution.
Thanks for pointing that out. That's an important distinction from simply being opposed to extending marriage to same-sex couples. Perhaps it was calculating, but nonetheless it helps clarify the President's position at the time.
Replying to myself:
Here's another question. Assuming you support the boycott, if you worked for Mozilla and Eich were selected, would you feel it is necessary to resign your job? If not, why not? If so, and if you work for a company, have you evaluated whether or not its CEO contributed to Proposition 8 or something similar? If not, then are you remiss in your moral and political duty? If so, then how long until you are living out in a shack in the woods? I figured out a long time ago that if I boycotted every company that took a stand I disagreed with, I wouldn't be able to do business with any large company. Obviously, you can't just throw up your hands and give up, but I really think this boycott is more likely to be counterproductive than not. However, that's just my opinion... and I have no problems with what Eich did. YMMV.
First link from Google:
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com...
Th problem is that he's tried to play all sides of the issue, and I imagine this was pretty transparent to all but the thickest voters. The states' right approach would be pretty reasonable in my view, except for the complication in this specific instance that states are required to honor contracts from other states. Nonetheless, it is the stand that I think passes muster with the Constitution and common sense.
It's certainly their right. I honestly don't think boycotts accomplish much, and as I've stated elsewhere, there are plenty of reasons to believe this boycott works _against_ the cause that it claims to support.
I think it's perfectly appropriate to being the President into it because he, at the time, held the exact same position on marriage, and he was very explicit and unequivocal about it. But no one is boycotting him for it, because he got elected twice. He's now changed his tune (which should have surprised no one), but in the intervening time, he was pretty much given a pass... probably because no one really took his claims seriously. Nonetheless, the GP's post was exactly right. When do you stop boycotting?
I sincerely believe Microsoft has done a lot of evil as a company, but I still use some of their products. Pretty much any big company, if you choose to look, will support some cause or belief that you will disagree with. Should you boycott all of them? Even if we back away relegating ourselves to living as hermits in our shacks in the woods and writing incoherent screeds against modern life, does this boycott even make sense?
I have nothing against the idea of speaking out against Eich, if you don't like what's he's done, in fact, you should. But assuming your boycott has a financial effect on the company... consider this: How many employees of Mozilla contributed _towards_ the cause of gay marriage? Does it matter? Has anyone asked that question? If Mozilla, as a group of people, is a net gain for a cause that is orthogonal to its purpose (which is to make software), and in this case, it's is quite likely, does it make sense to boycott it for a cause for which it has a net positive effect? Is it fair to punish all employees of the company, who did not have a choice in the selection of the CEO, for actions that the CEO took which have absolutely nothing to do with his role as an employee of that company? Is it responsible to boycott Mozilla unless you are sure that its existence as a company is actually harming the cause for which you stand? How could you ever even know?
There needs to be a public way to show them how wrong they are. A call for boycott is the easiest and cheap and pretty civilized.
But how is it convincing?
And if two men get divorced, do they just burn the house down because there's no woman to give it to?
No one cares. The real question is: Who gets custody of the X-Box?
When did marriage become a basic human right? Why is the government involved pro or con with it to begin with? Why is it only limited to two people?
The government originally became involved in marriage because the family is the building block of society and assisting in the foundation of stable families helps society function well. Now that marriage is seen as being all about and only about the people being married, and them being able to be labelled as such, that is no longer the case. Except prohibitions against polyamory to be next on the chopping block. People are already lining up. This is not about the ability to live your life the way you want.. because no one is preventing that now (and even where that is the case, the laws are being rapidly changed to fix that). It's now about having the ability to be validated by society. As the law traditionally stands, no one's rights are being violated, society just acknowledges that its social and biological bases are a net positive. There are already many, many prohibitions with respect to marriage: You cannot marry a relative, you cannot marry a child, you cannot marry more than one person at a time, and yet every one of these prevents people from living the life they want to live... and for good reasons, most of which also stem from the fact that these kinds of "marriages" are completely orthogonal to propagation of the race, and some are harmful in other ways as well. But it goes beyond that. Marriage is recognized and given a special status because it is the means by which society propagates itself, otherwise it's no different than a two-member club, and we all have the Constitutional right of free association.
The question I have is this: If any two people are able to declare one another as legal heirs to property, hospital visiting rights, joint tax returns, etc., what rights are being deprived if such a status is not called a "marriage"?
We have this silly notion just because someone doesn't 100% allign with the party, that some how they are 100% against it.
Welcome to politics in the 21st century. There is no debate. Non-conformity will be punished.
Obama stated explicitly that he believed that marriage is between a man and a woman, period. I guess it's a sign of my cynicism that I didn't believe for a second he meant it, only that he calculated that was the position to take at the time that would benefit him the most.
It's funny. I first registered a ./ account back around 2001 to complain about the lame April Fool's Day stories. If they are taking it easy, it's about time.
Rick
Why not? Established society has lots of problems. Here's a chance to try it again from scratch. Maybe they'll get it better. Maybe they won't. But maybe _our_ society will get better and maybe it won't. Either way, we have a lot of history to learn from... if we can.
Seems pretty obvious then, that the state of Oregon is incompetent and are to be blamed for contracting with company that is so widely known to be arrogant, evil, and incompetent.
Precisely. How does Oracle continue to be successful with the reputation they have?
Rick
Then why do you work with them? And more to the point, why did Oregon hire such a shitty company to work on a mission critical product? Who's fault is this, really?
As was stated elsewhere, because no one else successfully bid for the project.
There's plenty of blame to go around when Oracle was the only company unscrupulous enough to pretend they could honor the requirements of the contract.
Call me naive, but I would have thought by now that some of this known behavior by clients would have been worked into contract language that more or less "forces" clients to make decisions, accept the outcomes of scope increases, etc?
If 99% of America hadn't collectively forgotten how to manage anything bigger than a lemonade stand, you'd be right. The problem isn't that these projects are badly managed by both the client and contractor... the real problem is that everything is badly managed by almost everybody. We might be making huge leaps in terms of technology, but in terms of the ability to manage large complex operations, especially in the still relatively new technology industry, we are going backwards. Look at any big software company and the tremendous pool of talent they have working for them and compare it to the usually shoddy, lackluster results. Oracle is a perfect example, but almost any tech company will suffice.
That's the real problem.
At a certain point, "refusing to articulate "business requirements" effectively and repeatedly increasing the scope of the project" becomes the primary reason for project failure.
And knowing that this problem is endemic among government contracts is one reason why the whole idea of Obamacare should have been rejected out of hand from Day One. Complain all you want about how horrible private insurance companies are to deal with (and they are), but at some point they need to provide some value or they will go out of business. The Federal government is under no such constraint. There is no penalty for failure, except to trade one incompetent political party for the other every 4 or 8 years. The lifers in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy carry on in perpetuity, and the contractors always make out like bandits.
I give up. My time is worth more to me than the annual fine.
Maybe it only works on IE6. Did you try IE6?
What about Mosaic?
I'd make a joke about trying an Archie client, but that would be a step up.
> That's just one of the reasons - contractors are corporate scapegoats for hire. But they're also hired so that they can grease the decision makers with kickbacks.
Of course, don't forget that contractors more often than not earn the blame they get.
Anyone who has dealt with Oracle knows this. They have all the arrogance, evil and incompetence of Microsoft, except Microsoft at least attempts to make software people can actually use. Oracle's attitude is that if someone, somewhere, with no limit to the amount of effort, headache and voodoo required, can make it work, then it's good enough to ship.
Well, in this case VBA was necessary because it was a full-blown data entry Order Form GUI with a lot of complexity. Yes, everyone involved realized that Excel was not the best way to go about doing this, because I never failed to remind them, but it was chosen for a lot of other reasons. That said, despite the pain, and the ridiculous lengths I had to go through to make sure it worked for everyone* (despite them all having the same version of Office 2010 running on either XP or Windows 7), the end result was pretty slick.
At one point I took advantage of the DataTime picker control, because it's really useful, and it seemed safe because it was one of the standard Windows controls that was introduced in the days of Windows 95, approximately 16 years earlier at the time. How could it not be a standard component? Well, it turned out (apparently depending on what _non-Microsoft_ software was also installed on the computer) the app wouldn't run for some people even though they all had the same version of Excel 2010. Including some kind of installer was out of the questions (and obviated one of the few advantages of using Excel in the first place). I ended up having to remove it. Needless to say, it was one of the many, many ways that OLE completely failed to live up to any of the promises that were made about it.
Back in the late 70s/early 80s I figured out a series of rotations that would rotate only 4 center-edge cubes that was very useful in solving the puzzle, but it was incredibly unwieldly, requiring dozens of rotations. I could usually do the whole thing in about 15 minutes. That was good enough for me...
Yes, but the cost of the wasted time of those employees from using bad software is usually ignored, and that's the real problem.
We may be *finally* seeing an end to Microsoft's abusive stranglehold on the industry.
Yes, but the possibility that they will simply be replaced by another company's abusive strangehold (*cough*Google*cough*) is too high. I want Microsoft to fail. They deserve to fail. I literally believe Microsoft is the biggest roadblock holding back technology today. However, I still want them to be around and influential enough to keep Google or Apple or Amazon or Oracle or whoever else from becoming the same thing.
Plus, now that they finally have a new CEO, they might change their tune and stop being such a boat anchor on the industry. Yes, I don't expect them to stop being evil, but maybe they can avoid delivering another Vista or Windows 8 in favor of products like XP and Windows 7, which despite their flaws, are at least not always blatantly hostile to the customer's wants and needs.