I agree with Fluffeh. I can attest to all the incredibly creative and talented people I worked with at HP, to give another example. But the company was run like a case of AIDS, and so the efforts of those people have been pretty much for naught. There's a vast huge difference between having talented employees and being able to harness that talent effectively as a company. In some cases, you can even have a successful company for a while without many talented employees...that's how most ant colonies work as well. But if management is terrible, or the organization does not function well, the efforts of individual people won't make that much of a positive difference overall. And this shouldn't be so shocking, when you think about it...that's the whole point of a company in the first place, to gather people together in a group to make possible what cannot be done by one or two people working on their own.
A meritocracy is about the merits of what you do...this manifests itself in the hiring process as a 'resume'. Obviously, if you haven't been hired yet, you can't stand on the merits of what you have done for the prospective employer yet, so instead it's all about the merits of what you have done for past employers. But this has nothing to do with playing a video game, especially one that uses a fairly arbitrary skill to determine success. I agree that it'd be useful to have fair, objective and broadly applicable metrics for hiring decisions. But at the end of the day, jobs differ enormously, and so do the required skills, suitable temperaments, and even desirable personality traits. And often those factors differ for the same job, when different companies are compared, due to cultural or organizational differences.
No...because what they are talking about here is generation capacity. Generation capacity isn't measured in terms of units alone, but in terms of rate of delivery. This is important because generation and load have to stay in balance; that's a HUGE challenge with renewable resources like solar and wind, where environmental factors can cause generation to drop with little or no warning. It's also a challenge because peak load is what the grid has to be able to support; there are no significant resources available yet today (available, as opposed to merely 'invented') to smooth those peaks out. So if you're measuring joules, then this could be a 1 watt solar farm that runs for a billion hours...not very useful...or a 1 gigawatt solar farm that runs for 22 hours...a lot more useful. It's a subtle distinction but an incredibly important one. Generation capacity is all about maximum wattage capacity at any given point in time, not total watt hours delivered over time.
Actually, there is such a thing as GW/hr. Look at your electric bill...the measurement unit used there is kWh, or "kilowatt hour." One thousand of those is a GWh, or gigawatt hour. But that's a measure akin to volume; what is being discussed here is more like flow, so it's not accurate to call it that. Unless they're monkeying with the math...saying that a car reached "300 miles" in speed, letting us insert the "per hour" in our minds when in reality it went 15 MPH for 20 hours. More likely, they're just getting the terms slightly confused.
Why does everyone think that renewable energy sources will be the first technology ever that works completely the first time, solving all the problems right out of the gate? Nothing else has ever worked that way. You have to start somewhere...meeting a significant part of the needed generation part of the time is the first step to doing it much of the time. And then comes most of the time, and then maybe, heaven forbid, all of the time. Not all phones are VOIP yet either; that doesn't mean that VOIP is a failure as a technology. They haven't started blowing up their CTs and other fossil-based generation facilities just yet...
Midnight isn't the problem; power consumption is quite low then, and only drops more as the clock continues, only to start climbing well after dawn. Power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure has to be built for peak, and that's the problem. Fortunately, a lot of the peak load is during daylight hours. A lot of it is also in the evening as well, but it's not about finding a magic bullet, it's about helping cut back on (not eliminate) the need to use coal or nuclear power.
DARPA has a project going on this right now...it's called the "Cyber Genome" project. The idea is that you can perform a fair bit of attribution to the person/organization that wrote a piece of malware based on the characteristics of the code. It's true, as well...examination of Stuxnet, for example, made it clear that it was probably written by a highly organized team of diverse and very skilled individuals. And that's just looking at a single piece of malware; looking at things like Zeus has shown the progression of it, and even how malware can fork and develop along different lines. If you take it to the next step, the goal is to be able to predict the characteristics of an iteration before it's even written. Yeah, nobody said DARPA tries to solve easy problems:)
It's called giving zero fucks. I seriously can't even bring myself to care about people that get that worked up over words. The only words that can hurt me come from people that care enough to not try to do that. As soon as they do, say some nameless crazy bitch ex-gf, I drop them like a bad habit and they no longer have that power. It's pretty simple. The only people that can deeply hurt me, won't. The people that would, can't.
I would find your argument about abuse and nobody being able to hurt you with words a lot more compelling if you hadn't posted as an AC. The "C" stands for "Coward" for a reason, you know...
Betterunixthanunix is spot-on. The topic is entirely misleading; this is not a summit where people are discussing changing the Internet. They are discussing the ramifications of some of its content and usage. This is one of the really cool things about Judaism, actually...they debate current issues in a really logical manner, and despite the optics of a bunch of ultra-orthodox walking around in traditional garb, they are actually very forward-thinking. Take the religious trappings out of it for a second. Imagine instead that it was a congregation of tens of thousands of people from the tech sector engaging in the debate instead. How would you feel about it then? That's very much like what this is...only without the inevitable commercial conflicts of interest that would arise from such a secular gathering.
You can't take the power grid off the Internet. You know why? Because of (ironically) reliability. Let's look at Texas, which is governed by ERCOT. ERCOT facilitates sharing between the different power utilities, as well as energy trading. Much of this (and more in the future) is facilitated by communications about load, actual generation and available reserve generation capacity. These three numbers change more frequently, dramatically and unexpectedly than you might think. An industrial plant fires up a furnace...and whammo, suddenly a utility has 25MW of load show up out of nowhere without warning, and they have to push their boilers to produce more power to keep up. (If load and generation get out of balance, very bad things happen...but frequency regulation is a story for another time). If a plant trips because of some mishap, then suddenly a bunch of generation drops off the grid. If it's a big plant, then that utility may need to draw power from a neighbor to keep up, at least until they can restart the plant (or bring demand generators online).
Without these interconnections, the ability to respond this way greatly drops off. So it's a situation where the overall grid becomes more stable, but at the cost of providing a degree of interconnectivity that makes it more feasible for an attacker to go after it via cyber attacks. A lot is being done to manage the vulnerabilities and risks, mostly under the NERC CIP regulatory standards. There's a nugget of truth to the fearmongering, but taking it all off the Internet is not even remotely realistic.
Great...you first. Air-gap your work network, and then figure out how to move data in and out of it without using removable disks like USB drives. Good luck with that.
Agreed. This isn't something like 'driving while black,' where in the guise of fighting crime they can indiscriminately harass people. I would wager that the false-positive rate for this kind of detection is extremely low. Indeed, this gentleman was in possession of radioactive materials, even though it was for a legitimate purpose (and he could do no significant harm with them). And if you prevent the police from acting on this, then how are they supposed to detect a dirty bomb, for example? Not a nuclear weapon, which is still a bit far-fetched...but a dirty bomb, made with medical isotopes, for example. It has been tried before, and it'd be a nasty piece of work if one were detonated.
Actually, it will...because the truth is that Foxconn is not at all bad when you look at working conditions in China across the board. So, if Apple publicly does this and makes Foxconn a great place to work, they can then turn this whole perception around by highlighting what it's like for the workers who make HTC/Samsung/Motorola/etc devices.
Previous work with such data has already yielded some clues. "We have shown that if you live against your body clock, you're more likely to smoke, to drink alcohol, and drink far more coffee," says Roenneberg.
From the slashdot post: "or spend all weekend sleeping in and then get up at 6 am on Monday"
These look to me like behaviors of people who don't take care of themselves and/or who are lazy/inactive. I don't see how sleep is the cause. It makes more sense to me that it'd be the other way around...that inactivity tends to help cause obesity, and also correlates with sleeping in whenever you can, for example.
I've been involved in situations where people accidentally got exposed to child porn (or any other kind) because of popups from malware, and situations where they deliberately went out to find it. Trust me; the two sets of behavior, from a computer forensics perspective, look NOTHING alike. A pedobear's cache will be filled with the stuff, while the innocent bystander will have relatively few of them. I thought the same thing you did, once, but was actually shocked to see how incredibly different the two behaviors look.
Wow...are you that ignorant of law? It's the domain of the federal government the same way that sexual harrassment is, for example. Or racial discrimination in the workplace. Or any number of abusive practices by employers that are prohibited by the federal government. OSHA? Yeah, all that. EEOC? Yep. That too! And so on. Come to think of it...say, isn't there something called the "Department of Labor?" Hmmm...I wonder what THEY regulate...
I hope that people and privacy advocates would look at Google Analytics too. It is basically the same CarrierIQ is, only made for webpages. And Google has been abusing it for almost 10 years already.
No it isn't...it isn't even close to the same thing. CarrierIQ was capturing keystrokes, even though they said otherwise. CarrierIQ was something you could not block or neuter all all, unlike Google Analytics. A subset of what CarrierIQ does is slightly similar to what Google Analytics does, if instead of allowing the cellular carrier to diagnose mobile device issues you think in terms of a website owner looking at the traffic patterns within their own site, but that's not the subset that anyone cares about. And Google Analytics is NOT a decade old. This function used to be served by companies like Websense and other early SAAS providers that did analytics on 'stickiness' and figuring out which pages users were most likely to be at when they left a site. The analytics are provided for the site owner, so that they can look at how traffic patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of their site. Furthermore, the way Google does it supports using an "A/B" approach to site improvement (pick up this month's copy of Wired magazine to learn more about that), whereby you give random users slightly different versions of the same site and compare the results to see which is more effective...and that is HUGELY helpful.
Nor is Google Analytics 'abuse'. How do we know this? Because privacy advocates HAVE been looking at it.
I know, I know...it's suprising to find out that privacy organizations have been looking at a small boutique shop like Google; it's easy to think you were ahead of the curve with such a far-reaching idea as "hey, let's look at Google's handling of privacy matters!" Guess you just got to the idea a few minutes behind the very most bleeding-edge, eh?:)
Learn what something is before you get on a soapbox about how awful it is or how it's used. Here you go, here's a link. It was really hard to find, too.
They can. It's called Systems Management Server. And it works. The reason Microsoft doesn't do it for free is because then they have to deal with all the headaches of any oddness of the software or installer. Oh, and they would also be paying for the integration and deployment costs too. This is not what businesses do for free.
Further, Grimes falls headlong into the punch-bowl of the "Its popular, therefore, its attacked" Koolaid that Microsoft has been serving up for years now..
Here, you hit the nail on the head...but it isn't about open- versus closed-source. It's about the real problem...patching. Most exploitation involves Flash, Java or Adobe Reader vulnerabilities largely because these don't get patched as easily. Microsoft became the gold standard in patch deployment over the past several years, and as a result the time in which a Microsoft-based vulnerability can be counted on to produce botted host after botted host from a compromised website is far shorter. On the other hand, Java and Adobe both tend to lag a bit in their patching, and their systems rely upon a reboot to even look for the latest version. When Microsoft pushes a patch, within 24-36 hours I usually have it installed. I don't know how long it takes between when the latest Java engine is out and when I happen to reboot and, once my machine comes back up...ah, look! A new Java version!
Criminals will always exist, and they will go after the easier targets. Vulnerabilities will always exist. The key is to patch the vulnerabilities quickly enough and frequently enough that criminals look for lower-hanging fruit.
This is not about any particular enemy. This is about the fact that both of the current front-running aerial weapons systems/cash cows...the F-22 and F-35...are on the ropes as being irrelevant and horrifically expensive. This is about the industry that makes such systems trying to come up with a new market to sell to, before the aforementioned projects get cut entirely and they find themselves in deep trouble.
Wow, where do I fucking begin with how ass-poundingly dumb THIS idea is. Mandate open standards for what, exactly? Data exchange? Data storage? The underlying schema? Write a law that defines how all social networks have to use 'standards' for how to do their business. Great. What a douchebag, just for thinking that this is even feasible under current law. While he's at it, he should define the companies that fall under this...theoretically, Slashdot could fall within it, as could Gawker. IF such legislation ever came to pass it would require that all companies in scope gut their internal systems and code to comply...think about that one.
"reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders"
Holy shit. He wants to just usurp all the legal precedent about the existential nature of what defines a corporation? Actually, no...it's far, far worse than that. What if it's pre-IPO (in other words, as it stands today) Facebook? There IS no board of directors yet...there are no shareholders, because there is no stock. So...force privately-held organizations to bow down and hand over control for free...or conversely, do the same to shareholders of existing corporations? Again, not even remotely feasible under law. Ownership and control are linked. You cannot, in a democratic and free society, just arbitrarily take control from people who own and give it to the masses. That behavior is for socialist, communist, and national socialist forms of government.
This faggot gives me a case of Tourette's that would make a sailor bleed from the ears. He should learn about government and the rights of individuals...and while he's at it, should study up on examples of what's happened when the government has mandated 'standards' in the past (like HIPAA)...before he comes out with this bullshit. And believe it or not, I'm a centrist/liberal!
No, but I hear the previews of 'Grand Theft Carbomb' are very promising. Very realistic...you blow up about a dozen people, and then a JDAM levels your house, and you pretend that you're winning!:)
Okay, so here's the thing. It's not like Bashir Assad came to power just before the industry...small as it may have been...crumbled. He was there all along, and his father Hafez before him, who was even worse. So, if the dictatorship is what killed the industry, how did the industry come to be in the first place, eh? Sanctions kill business; that's the whole point of them. They deny trade and commerce, and in doing so cause economic hardship. And I think you're reading too much into the Huffington Post's comment; it's not like they are saying the sanctions are bad. If anyone's putting the logic and facts aside for the purposes of pure political loyalty, it's you.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with Fluffeh. I can attest to all the incredibly creative and talented people I worked with at HP, to give another example. But the company was run like a case of AIDS, and so the efforts of those people have been pretty much for naught. There's a vast huge difference between having talented employees and being able to harness that talent effectively as a company. In some cases, you can even have a successful company for a while without many talented employees...that's how most ant colonies work as well. But if management is terrible, or the organization does not function well, the efforts of individual people won't make that much of a positive difference overall. And this shouldn't be so shocking, when you think about it...that's the whole point of a company in the first place, to gather people together in a group to make possible what cannot be done by one or two people working on their own.
A meritocracy is about the merits of what you do...this manifests itself in the hiring process as a 'resume'. Obviously, if you haven't been hired yet, you can't stand on the merits of what you have done for the prospective employer yet, so instead it's all about the merits of what you have done for past employers. But this has nothing to do with playing a video game, especially one that uses a fairly arbitrary skill to determine success. I agree that it'd be useful to have fair, objective and broadly applicable metrics for hiring decisions. But at the end of the day, jobs differ enormously, and so do the required skills, suitable temperaments, and even desirable personality traits. And often those factors differ for the same job, when different companies are compared, due to cultural or organizational differences.
No...because what they are talking about here is generation capacity. Generation capacity isn't measured in terms of units alone, but in terms of rate of delivery. This is important because generation and load have to stay in balance; that's a HUGE challenge with renewable resources like solar and wind, where environmental factors can cause generation to drop with little or no warning. It's also a challenge because peak load is what the grid has to be able to support; there are no significant resources available yet today (available, as opposed to merely 'invented') to smooth those peaks out. So if you're measuring joules, then this could be a 1 watt solar farm that runs for a billion hours...not very useful...or a 1 gigawatt solar farm that runs for 22 hours...a lot more useful. It's a subtle distinction but an incredibly important one. Generation capacity is all about maximum wattage capacity at any given point in time, not total watt hours delivered over time.
Actually, there is such a thing as GW/hr. Look at your electric bill...the measurement unit used there is kWh, or "kilowatt hour." One thousand of those is a GWh, or gigawatt hour. But that's a measure akin to volume; what is being discussed here is more like flow, so it's not accurate to call it that. Unless they're monkeying with the math...saying that a car reached "300 miles" in speed, letting us insert the "per hour" in our minds when in reality it went 15 MPH for 20 hours. More likely, they're just getting the terms slightly confused.
Why does everyone think that renewable energy sources will be the first technology ever that works completely the first time, solving all the problems right out of the gate? Nothing else has ever worked that way. You have to start somewhere...meeting a significant part of the needed generation part of the time is the first step to doing it much of the time. And then comes most of the time, and then maybe, heaven forbid, all of the time. Not all phones are VOIP yet either; that doesn't mean that VOIP is a failure as a technology. They haven't started blowing up their CTs and other fossil-based generation facilities just yet...
What percentage is generated at midnight?
Midnight isn't the problem; power consumption is quite low then, and only drops more as the clock continues, only to start climbing well after dawn. Power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure has to be built for peak, and that's the problem. Fortunately, a lot of the peak load is during daylight hours. A lot of it is also in the evening as well, but it's not about finding a magic bullet, it's about helping cut back on (not eliminate) the need to use coal or nuclear power.
DARPA has a project going on this right now...it's called the "Cyber Genome" project. The idea is that you can perform a fair bit of attribution to the person/organization that wrote a piece of malware based on the characteristics of the code. It's true, as well...examination of Stuxnet, for example, made it clear that it was probably written by a highly organized team of diverse and very skilled individuals. And that's just looking at a single piece of malware; looking at things like Zeus has shown the progression of it, and even how malware can fork and develop along different lines. If you take it to the next step, the goal is to be able to predict the characteristics of an iteration before it's even written. Yeah, nobody said DARPA tries to solve easy problems :)
I would find your argument about abuse and nobody being able to hurt you with words a lot more compelling if you hadn't posted as an AC. The "C" stands for "Coward" for a reason, you know...
Betterunixthanunix is spot-on. The topic is entirely misleading; this is not a summit where people are discussing changing the Internet. They are discussing the ramifications of some of its content and usage. This is one of the really cool things about Judaism, actually...they debate current issues in a really logical manner, and despite the optics of a bunch of ultra-orthodox walking around in traditional garb, they are actually very forward-thinking. Take the religious trappings out of it for a second. Imagine instead that it was a congregation of tens of thousands of people from the tech sector engaging in the debate instead. How would you feel about it then? That's very much like what this is...only without the inevitable commercial conflicts of interest that would arise from such a secular gathering.
You can't take the power grid off the Internet. You know why? Because of (ironically) reliability. Let's look at Texas, which is governed by ERCOT. ERCOT facilitates sharing between the different power utilities, as well as energy trading. Much of this (and more in the future) is facilitated by communications about load, actual generation and available reserve generation capacity. These three numbers change more frequently, dramatically and unexpectedly than you might think. An industrial plant fires up a furnace...and whammo, suddenly a utility has 25MW of load show up out of nowhere without warning, and they have to push their boilers to produce more power to keep up. (If load and generation get out of balance, very bad things happen...but frequency regulation is a story for another time). If a plant trips because of some mishap, then suddenly a bunch of generation drops off the grid. If it's a big plant, then that utility may need to draw power from a neighbor to keep up, at least until they can restart the plant (or bring demand generators online).
Without these interconnections, the ability to respond this way greatly drops off. So it's a situation where the overall grid becomes more stable, but at the cost of providing a degree of interconnectivity that makes it more feasible for an attacker to go after it via cyber attacks. A lot is being done to manage the vulnerabilities and risks, mostly under the NERC CIP regulatory standards. There's a nugget of truth to the fearmongering, but taking it all off the Internet is not even remotely realistic.
Great...you first. Air-gap your work network, and then figure out how to move data in and out of it without using removable disks like USB drives. Good luck with that.
Government just got a tiny bit smaller!
Agreed. This isn't something like 'driving while black,' where in the guise of fighting crime they can indiscriminately harass people. I would wager that the false-positive rate for this kind of detection is extremely low. Indeed, this gentleman was in possession of radioactive materials, even though it was for a legitimate purpose (and he could do no significant harm with them). And if you prevent the police from acting on this, then how are they supposed to detect a dirty bomb, for example? Not a nuclear weapon, which is still a bit far-fetched...but a dirty bomb, made with medical isotopes, for example. It has been tried before, and it'd be a nasty piece of work if one were detonated.
Actually, it will...because the truth is that Foxconn is not at all bad when you look at working conditions in China across the board. So, if Apple publicly does this and makes Foxconn a great place to work, they can then turn this whole perception around by highlighting what it's like for the workers who make HTC/Samsung/Motorola/etc devices.
Finally, an interface that lets us turn women on.
I think the real market would be for an interface that lets us mute them at times.
From the article:
From the slashdot post:
"or spend all weekend sleeping in and then get up at 6 am on Monday"
These look to me like behaviors of people who don't take care of themselves and/or who are lazy/inactive. I don't see how sleep is the cause. It makes more sense to me that it'd be the other way around...that inactivity tends to help cause obesity, and also correlates with sleeping in whenever you can, for example.
I've been involved in situations where people accidentally got exposed to child porn (or any other kind) because of popups from malware, and situations where they deliberately went out to find it. Trust me; the two sets of behavior, from a computer forensics perspective, look NOTHING alike. A pedobear's cache will be filled with the stuff, while the innocent bystander will have relatively few of them. I thought the same thing you did, once, but was actually shocked to see how incredibly different the two behaviors look.
Wow...are you that ignorant of law? It's the domain of the federal government the same way that sexual harrassment is, for example. Or racial discrimination in the workplace. Or any number of abusive practices by employers that are prohibited by the federal government. OSHA? Yeah, all that. EEOC? Yep. That too! And so on. Come to think of it...say, isn't there something called the "Department of Labor?" Hmmm...I wonder what THEY regulate...
I hope that people and privacy advocates would look at Google Analytics too. It is basically the same CarrierIQ is, only made for webpages. And Google has been abusing it for almost 10 years already.
No it isn't...it isn't even close to the same thing. CarrierIQ was capturing keystrokes, even though they said otherwise. CarrierIQ was something you could not block or neuter all all, unlike Google Analytics. A subset of what CarrierIQ does is slightly similar to what Google Analytics does, if instead of allowing the cellular carrier to diagnose mobile device issues you think in terms of a website owner looking at the traffic patterns within their own site, but that's not the subset that anyone cares about. And Google Analytics is NOT a decade old. This function used to be served by companies like Websense and other early SAAS providers that did analytics on 'stickiness' and figuring out which pages users were most likely to be at when they left a site. The analytics are provided for the site owner, so that they can look at how traffic patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of their site. Furthermore, the way Google does it supports using an "A/B" approach to site improvement (pick up this month's copy of Wired magazine to learn more about that), whereby you give random users slightly different versions of the same site and compare the results to see which is more effective...and that is HUGELY helpful.
Nor is Google Analytics 'abuse'. How do we know this? Because privacy advocates HAVE been looking at it.
I know, I know...it's suprising to find out that privacy organizations have been looking at a small boutique shop like Google; it's easy to think you were ahead of the curve with such a far-reaching idea as "hey, let's look at Google's handling of privacy matters!" Guess you just got to the idea a few minutes behind the very most bleeding-edge, eh? :)
Learn what something is before you get on a soapbox about how awful it is or how it's used. Here you go, here's a link. It was really hard to find, too.
They can. It's called Systems Management Server. And it works. The reason Microsoft doesn't do it for free is because then they have to deal with all the headaches of any oddness of the software or installer. Oh, and they would also be paying for the integration and deployment costs too. This is not what businesses do for free.
You are right of course.
Further, Grimes falls headlong into the punch-bowl of the "Its popular, therefore, its attacked" Koolaid that Microsoft has been serving up for years now. .
Here, you hit the nail on the head...but it isn't about open- versus closed-source. It's about the real problem...patching. Most exploitation involves Flash, Java or Adobe Reader vulnerabilities largely because these don't get patched as easily. Microsoft became the gold standard in patch deployment over the past several years, and as a result the time in which a Microsoft-based vulnerability can be counted on to produce botted host after botted host from a compromised website is far shorter. On the other hand, Java and Adobe both tend to lag a bit in their patching, and their systems rely upon a reboot to even look for the latest version. When Microsoft pushes a patch, within 24-36 hours I usually have it installed. I don't know how long it takes between when the latest Java engine is out and when I happen to reboot and, once my machine comes back up...ah, look! A new Java version!
Criminals will always exist, and they will go after the easier targets. Vulnerabilities will always exist. The key is to patch the vulnerabilities quickly enough and frequently enough that criminals look for lower-hanging fruit.
This is not about any particular enemy. This is about the fact that both of the current front-running aerial weapons systems/cash cows...the F-22 and F-35...are on the ropes as being irrelevant and horrifically expensive. This is about the industry that makes such systems trying to come up with a new market to sell to, before the aforementioned projects get cut entirely and they find themselves in deep trouble.
"Mandate open standards by firms"
Wow, where do I fucking begin with how ass-poundingly dumb THIS idea is. Mandate open standards for what, exactly? Data exchange? Data storage? The underlying schema? Write a law that defines how all social networks have to use 'standards' for how to do their business. Great. What a douchebag, just for thinking that this is even feasible under current law. While he's at it, he should define the companies that fall under this...theoretically, Slashdot could fall within it, as could Gawker. IF such legislation ever came to pass it would require that all companies in scope gut their internal systems and code to comply...think about that one.
"reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders"
Holy shit. He wants to just usurp all the legal precedent about the existential nature of what defines a corporation? Actually, no...it's far, far worse than that. What if it's pre-IPO (in other words, as it stands today) Facebook? There IS no board of directors yet...there are no shareholders, because there is no stock. So...force privately-held organizations to bow down and hand over control for free...or conversely, do the same to shareholders of existing corporations? Again, not even remotely feasible under law. Ownership and control are linked. You cannot, in a democratic and free society, just arbitrarily take control from people who own and give it to the masses. That behavior is for socialist, communist, and national socialist forms of government.
This faggot gives me a case of Tourette's that would make a sailor bleed from the ears. He should learn about government and the rights of individuals...and while he's at it, should study up on examples of what's happened when the government has mandated 'standards' in the past (like HIPAA)...before he comes out with this bullshit. And believe it or not, I'm a centrist/liberal!
No, but I hear the previews of 'Grand Theft Carbomb' are very promising. Very realistic...you blow up about a dozen people, and then a JDAM levels your house, and you pretend that you're winning! :)
Okay, so here's the thing. It's not like Bashir Assad came to power just before the industry...small as it may have been...crumbled. He was there all along, and his father Hafez before him, who was even worse. So, if the dictatorship is what killed the industry, how did the industry come to be in the first place, eh? Sanctions kill business; that's the whole point of them. They deny trade and commerce, and in doing so cause economic hardship. And I think you're reading too much into the Huffington Post's comment; it's not like they are saying the sanctions are bad. If anyone's putting the logic and facts aside for the purposes of pure political loyalty, it's you.