If they don't have any rights at all, how does that not justify unlimited harm?
Oh, I see... either you're actually ignorant and clueless, or you're being willfully ignorant and clueless.
Tell you what, why don't you learn the difference between natural rights and legal rights.
Corporations, by definition, DO NOT HAVE NATURAL RIGHTS.
The process of incorporation (a process granted by governments) confers upon them legal rights, but a corporation is a purely legally defined entity, and is not naturally existing. A corporation can only exist as defined and overseen by governments, they are not a natural phenomenon, and never have been
So, corporations have precisely the rights governments tell them they do. Not paying taxes isn't one of those things.
Corporations seem to think they magically have the right to decide how much taxes they will pay and on what terms.
Here we go. This is effectively talking about being ideologically pure enough for open source.
Sorry, users want the end result, not the ideology. Most people do not want to deal with the political crap which goes around this.
I've seen "discussions" about this in IT almost devolve into fist fights, as someone invariably starts to sound like Stallman -- a smug, condescending prick who acts holier-than-thou and tells you how wrong you are.
So, you'll excuse me if my first response is "not everyone gives a damn, and many people do not want to hear the screeching weasels which come along with this discussion".
Rabid ideological open source are the vegans of the technology world -- mostly they piss people off and cause a lot of eye rolling as they foam at the mouth.
I've seen people go off on people who don't work in tech, and those people find themselves feeling like they've been ambushed by some idiot who tells them they'll burn in hell.
I was only addressing your idea that it's OK to do unlimited harm to (people involved in) corporations because they filed some paperwork to create an organization.
No, that is your idea, not mine.
I said that corporations don't have natural rights, and certainly don't have the right to not be taxed.
Did I ever say "unlimited harm"? No, I didn't, because you're just making shit up.
People have natural rights. People don't give up their natural rights when they form an organization like a corporation. Whatever harm you mean to cause corporations, that harm will be felt by the people involved.
And, what 'natural right' of the people who form corporations is given up when those corporations are taxed? Yes, that's right... NONE WHATSOEVER.
Are you claiming that corporations magically acquire more 'natural rights' than the people who made them? Because I sure as hell don't have a "right" to not be taxed.
That's a bullshit argument -- humans are taxed, corporations exist by permission of government, so why the hell wouldn't corporations be taxed by government?
Taxing corporations isn't "harm" unless you're stupid enough to believe corporations are entitled to not be taxed. And, why would that be again?
What's insane is the idea that somehow Google as a corporation is magically exempted from paying taxes in places where it has incorporated, because they feel entitled to not be taxed, and because they can play a shell game to move the money to other places.
As far as I can tell, "Internet of Things" is at present a purely marketing term, and something bandied about by people who are telling us how awesome the future will be and what we'll be using.
Is it a real thing? Is this what people actually want? Or is this just hype and bullshit?
Me, I'm more thinking this falls into the category of most forms of prognostication, isn't as inevitable or desired as people think, and a whole bunch of people are making money by talking about "Interwebs of Stuff".
It's hard not to see this as so much marketing crap, and something for the analysts to talk about that, as usual, they have no idea if it's real or not but need to sell their services.
You know, corporations have no inherent natural right to anything. Corporations are a construct created and regulated by governments.
Corporations have no such thing as natural rights, because corporations are not a natural thing. They are a legal construct, and nothing more. They aren't some protected species.
So, yes, when you incorporate to get certain benefits from the government, you do it under their terms. And that has a pretty good chance of including paying taxes.
So, your status as a corporation isn't some magical, inherent thing in the universe. It's not an objective fact. It's not defined by physics.
Governments keep giving tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy under the lie that this will create jobs and stimulate the economy. And the they destroy jobs, and sit on record high piles of money and not do anything for the economy.
From what everyone who isn't a corporation can tell, giving tax breaks to corporations has NONE of the claimed benefits. All this has done is put more money in the hands of the few, and leave the rest of us begging for scraps.
But don't think for a minute that a corporation is in any way entitled or has some inherent natural right to make money which isn't taxed.
Because that's complete bullshit.
Corporations do not exist without the permission of governments. Which means it's corporations which don't have any natural rights in this equation. And they certainly don't have some inherent right to not be taxed.
Well, North Korea has officially said "Wait and See".
The film, due for release on Christmas, has drawn criticism from the North Korean government, which called it an "evil act of provocation" and an "undisguised sponsoring of terrorism" and asked the United Nations to block its release. A government website also threatened the filmmakers with "stern punishment."
Apparently the supreme, glorious little runt doesn't like being teased, and seems to think his delusional self is exempt from parody.
If so, this would be kind of hilarious, and kind of scary... a nation state doing this stuff because their leader tender ego is feeling bruised.
If this is North Korea, this is all about waving around the collective penis, and posturing that he has any influence on the rest of the world.
I am not disagreeing that maintaining the legacy system can be very expensive and a losing battle,
But, I've seen projects which run on for several years, and at ever increasing cost... and sooner or later someone has to decide if they keep going or scrap it.
I've seen about 5-6 such projects get completely scrapped due to costs.
Because, and I have witnessed this several times... the initial team guiding the project has the advice of someone who believes his pet technology can solve any problem. And the further you get into the project, the more you realize that pet technology can't even come close to doing the job.
I've seen one or two projects where within about six months, everyone except management (and the technology champion) have realized there is no way in hell the project can be done -- and then people start leaving to escape the fallout. Which then accelerates the rate at which the project fails.
And, very often, you realize the extent to which you would need to replace or retool another dozen things which integrate with the thing you're replacing --- and then you realize you need bout 10x more money than you thought.
Sometimes, you realize these things aren't just "dumb holdovers that nobody needs". Sometimes, you realize those things underly all aspects of your business, and changing them is almost impossible.
That's actually what I've seen more often.
I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't replace legacy systems. I'm saying sometimes companies discover it's a lot more expensive and difficult than believed, and can't justify the expense to keep trying.
Very often the person most loudly saying "we should modernize this" is the person who has the least insights and knowledge of the system being replaced, which means they might be talking out of their ass in terms of what is involved.
And, except for the advertising... did anything at all change for consumers? Or is it something they could tout as the new awesomeness, while giving you the same service as before?
Did your bill drop? Did your bandwidth allocation go up?
My perception is this technology didn't improve the service sold to consumers, and neither will 5G.
It will be a marketing coup, but beyond that, none of these super awesome enhancements will be seen by the users.
So, call it whatever the hell you like. At the end of the day, you're not gonna get the benefits they claim it brings. Or if you do, it will be in limited areas which are the most profitable.
In other words... yawn, wake me up when telcos really sell this to us.
Yeah, my thinking when someone talks about modernizing legacy systems is usually... "Have you ever actually been on a project to do this?"
In my personal experience, the older the legacy system, and the more embedded it is in your business... the harder it is to replace.
I've been on a few projects trying to replace 25-40 year old computer systems. And pretty much all of them have been epic failures because people woefully underestimate how much work is involved, and don't fully appreciate all of the things they haven't considered until it's so far into the process to be too late to fix.
It's an admirable goal. but usually proves far more complex than the people championing it realize.
Quit your whining. If they didn't have 5G to tout as the next big lie, they wouldn't be able to inflate the stock prices on the claim that something awesome is coming.
Why, if we acknowledged that 5G would give you zero net benefit over the falsely named 4G, or that it's really only 3G... then how could we increase executive compensation packages?
Just think of all those poor, starving telecom CEOs who need to be able to forecast a rosy picture to the analysts to make it sound like something cool is coming.
Why, with the advent of 5G we can tell you how much more you can do with your mobile phone, and we can expand our customer base, pump the value of the stock, and increase shareholder value and increase executive compensation.
It's only after that we'll cry poor and say we can't afford to give you what we promised.
Why do you hate America?
5G is clearly 25% better than 4G, and 66% better than 3G so -- stop standing in the way of progress.
I kind of got the impression most things being called 4G weren't even properly that.
So now we'll have a rollout of something called 5G which isn't?
Know what I expect? We won't see faster, we won't suddenly see a lot of additional bandwidth. For promotional purposes it's fast and awesome... and for practical purposes the carriers will scale it back because they're incapable of selling you what they will claim it to be.
I simply don't believe the carriers will be able to deploy what this thing could be theoretically. All they'll do it repackage the same shitty service and charge extra for it, while crying poor about how they can't keep up with the bandwidth demands.
Because telcos are lying, greedy bastards who put more effort into marketing than quality of their product.
They've been telling us how awesome their network speeds are for over a decade. And they've been unwilling to live up to that the entire time.
Case in point: Unlimited data plans, which are so much marketing bullshit it's not funny.
I'm a certified accountant so I'm kind of giggling over you telling me "how accounting works".
Well, since you come here to Slashdot and have a low UID, you should understand something by now:
Most people believe that accounting is the art of fudging your books to look like how you want it to appear, and hide as much money so it can be funneled into executive bonuses, kick back schemes, and hookers.
Something has to happen to sustain that $30 billion in net worth held by Jeff Bezos.
In general we put about must expectation of truth coming out of corporate accounting as we do beer coming out of city tap water -- because corporations are awfully good at chicanery and concealing the truth when it comes to accounting. Especially any multi-national corporation, or one which makes movies and music. We don't always take "lost money" to mean lost money in the same way we mean it.
So, while I'm not saying you are a lying, deceptive bastard who is skilled in the art of hiding money... I will say that in general I think that corporate accounting is, in fact, dominated by people who are lying, deceptive bastards skilled in the art of hiding money, and that what shows as a loss this quarter isn't necessarily one.;-)
And yet they still lost money and have been for at least the last 2 years (possibly 3 once this years numbers come out).
Bah, knowing about Hollywood accounting, offshore tax shelters, and everything else... I mostly don't believe corporations when they say this.
Did they lose money, or did they run a shell game to move around money to make it look like they lost money?
These days, it's highly profitable to "lose" money when you have a network of wholly-owned subsidiaries who can charge you crazy rates to replace the toilet paper.
I'm not saying they didn't actually lose money. But corporations are awfully good at not making money on paper.
Either way, I bet executive compensation and bonuses was at record highs. Probably slightly larger than the amount of money they claim to have lost.
My point is that none of this is new. It is neither interesting nor innovative.
Well, let's think about this:
Because Kiva-equipped facilities eliminate the need for wide aisles for humans to walk down, eighth-generation centers can also hold 50% more inventory
They're saying eighth generation.
So, just maybe, they're not saying "ZOMG, we invented teh automation bitches"... and what they're actually saying is "after several iterations, these have gotten better and more efficient".
Since Amazon isn't saying what they have is new, or especially innovative... maybe it's still interesting?
Really? I would love to learn how to make money by giving someone virtually nothing to solve all their problems.
Well, the mechanics of running a scam don't actually require you to learn anything about the pretend science.
Find gullible people. Sell them something which costs you nothing at a huge profit. Run like hell before the law shows up.
Snake oil selling 101.
Double extra bonus points if you can find something like homeopathy which is apparently legal.
Since all the pretend "medicines" are diluted beyond the point of having any trace of anything, you just fill a bunch of different jars with tap water and practice your mumbo-jumbo speeches, and your sales pitch -- Why yes, Mr. Smith, we should move you to a dosage which has even less in it, because it will be stronger.. unfortunately, it is also far more costly to produce.
I guess you could find another charlatan willing to train you and accredit you in the preparation of fake medicine, but I'm not sure I see the point. Though, I guess the plaque on the wall and the ability to remember that you're supposed to be using tincture of monkey butt to treat a specific ailment might help you in case your marks have read up a little on the topic.
And you can probably have a pretty good side business selling healing crystals, patchouli, and new age books.
Of course, that might be a lot of work and paperwork, so setting up a Ponzi scheme could work too.:-P
I actually have a relative who is a schizophrenic, have known my share of people seriously affected by mental illness and/or homelessness, and have known a couple of people who were on antipsychotics.
You're right, it's a disservice to them to compare them to Bennett.
The mission did not succeed in most of its stated objectives. By definition that makes it a failure.
Well, think of it as being two distinct phases.
First, you rendezvouz with the comet. That's an extraordinary feat, and worked brilliantly. It represents several firsts, because matching speed with a comet and being in the same place it's supposed to be in 10 years? That's pretty damned hard to do.
Second you fire the lander portion at the comet and hope it sticks. And it has to stick to an object you aren't 100% sure of its shape, rate of spin, and composition. And it has to do it by itself because of the communication delay.
Which seems kind of like trying to tell a blind person when to cross the street based on your out-dated video view of the street, and no idea what the future traffic is going to be.
The part that failed was the "OK, you're mostly kinda pointing across the busy highway... now start running when you get this and let us know when you get to the other side".
And in an interview I heard with one of the project members before the final landing... they knew damned well that was kind of a high risk thing, and was being done completely blind.
So, the huge task of making rendezvous was pretty much textbook.
The blindfolded-on-a-moving-train "Annie Oakley" sharp shooting bit? Surprisingly, quite difficult.
Maybe they should ask frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton
Nobody needs to ask Bennet what he thinks.
When he decides the world needs another of his missives, it simply happens... and the pearls of wisdom appear, like semen dribbling out of a discarded condom in a dirty alley.
This is the first real opportunity to get a feeling for whether childhood dreams will be crushed or Disney, with the help of JJ Abrams, will be able to breath new life into the story without making it feel like a merchandising excuse.
Let's face it, it is a merchandising excuse.
Di$ney will have fresh Star Wars everything on sale.
The movie will be guaranteed to have some cloyingly cute character which can be marketed to kids.
Taco Bell and McDonalds will have special toys.
They'l re-re-re-re-release extended cuts or special editions of the damned movies.
Little children will have R2D2 pyjamas and underpants. And diapers. And sippy cups. And hats. And halloween costumes.
Disney will eventually put out 9 more movies, of ever diminishing artistic merit.
There will be friggin' Ewok porn.
I'm nostalgic about the first series. I mostly liked the second series but it had some issues.
But I tried to watch Episode I with my wife, and within five minutes of Jar Jar Binks appearing on screen she said "if he's in the rest of this film I'm leaving". So now if I want to watch it I'm on my own, and the pod racer scene is mostly how I calibrate my home theater.
I honestly can't decide if I will see this or not.
But let's not for a minute pretend this is being done for any reason besides the zillions of dollars Disney expects to wring from this franchise.
If they were doing a billion a year in merchandising for Cars years after it was released, you won't believe the marketing blitz which will accompany this.
You know, as much as a lot of people are looking at this as a failure, I look at this as a reminder of just how damned difficult this kind of stuff is.
What was it? Ten years in transit, several slingshots around planets to build up speed, deep hibernation for something like two years, waking up, finding where it is in space, find the damned comet, get close to it, and the launch the landing bits and pray that it works because it's all automated.
It really really sucks that this didn't play out as everyone hoped.
But it's mind boggling how many things went utterly right before one thing went wrong.
My mind boggles over the sheer amount of engineering on this which actually worked, and the massive number of things which are lurking to go wrong.
It's hard to even think of an analogy for this... jumping out of a plane without a parachute and landing in a moving convertible which someone told you 10 years would be passing through the middle of Kansas somewhere around noon... while blindfolded, knitting a sweater,assembling a piano, and juggling sharks.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I see ... either you're actually ignorant and clueless, or you're being willfully ignorant and clueless.
Tell you what, why don't you learn the difference between natural rights and legal rights.
Corporations, by definition, DO NOT HAVE NATURAL RIGHTS.
The process of incorporation (a process granted by governments) confers upon them legal rights, but a corporation is a purely legally defined entity, and is not naturally existing. A corporation can only exist as defined and overseen by governments, they are not a natural phenomenon, and never have been
So, corporations have precisely the rights governments tell them they do. Not paying taxes isn't one of those things.
Corporations seem to think they magically have the right to decide how much taxes they will pay and on what terms.
They don't.
Here we go. This is effectively talking about being ideologically pure enough for open source.
Sorry, users want the end result, not the ideology. Most people do not want to deal with the political crap which goes around this.
I've seen "discussions" about this in IT almost devolve into fist fights, as someone invariably starts to sound like Stallman -- a smug, condescending prick who acts holier-than-thou and tells you how wrong you are.
So, you'll excuse me if my first response is "not everyone gives a damn, and many people do not want to hear the screeching weasels which come along with this discussion".
Rabid ideological open source are the vegans of the technology world -- mostly they piss people off and cause a lot of eye rolling as they foam at the mouth.
I've seen people go off on people who don't work in tech, and those people find themselves feeling like they've been ambushed by some idiot who tells them they'll burn in hell.
I say this whole article is flamebait.
No, that is your idea, not mine.
I said that corporations don't have natural rights, and certainly don't have the right to not be taxed.
Did I ever say "unlimited harm"? No, I didn't, because you're just making shit up.
And, what 'natural right' of the people who form corporations is given up when those corporations are taxed? Yes, that's right ... NONE WHATSOEVER.
Are you claiming that corporations magically acquire more 'natural rights' than the people who made them? Because I sure as hell don't have a "right" to not be taxed.
That's a bullshit argument -- humans are taxed, corporations exist by permission of government, so why the hell wouldn't corporations be taxed by government?
Taxing corporations isn't "harm" unless you're stupid enough to believe corporations are entitled to not be taxed. And, why would that be again?
What's insane is the idea that somehow Google as a corporation is magically exempted from paying taxes in places where it has incorporated, because they feel entitled to not be taxed, and because they can play a shell game to move the money to other places.
As far as I can tell, "Internet of Things" is at present a purely marketing term, and something bandied about by people who are telling us how awesome the future will be and what we'll be using.
Is it a real thing? Is this what people actually want? Or is this just hype and bullshit?
Me, I'm more thinking this falls into the category of most forms of prognostication, isn't as inevitable or desired as people think, and a whole bunch of people are making money by talking about "Interwebs of Stuff".
It's hard not to see this as so much marketing crap, and something for the analysts to talk about that, as usual, they have no idea if it's real or not but need to sell their services.
You know, corporations have no inherent natural right to anything. Corporations are a construct created and regulated by governments.
Corporations have no such thing as natural rights, because corporations are not a natural thing. They are a legal construct, and nothing more. They aren't some protected species.
So, yes, when you incorporate to get certain benefits from the government, you do it under their terms. And that has a pretty good chance of including paying taxes.
So, your status as a corporation isn't some magical, inherent thing in the universe. It's not an objective fact. It's not defined by physics.
Governments keep giving tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy under the lie that this will create jobs and stimulate the economy. And the they destroy jobs, and sit on record high piles of money and not do anything for the economy.
From what everyone who isn't a corporation can tell, giving tax breaks to corporations has NONE of the claimed benefits. All this has done is put more money in the hands of the few, and leave the rest of us begging for scraps.
But don't think for a minute that a corporation is in any way entitled or has some inherent natural right to make money which isn't taxed.
Because that's complete bullshit.
Corporations do not exist without the permission of governments. Which means it's corporations which don't have any natural rights in this equation. And they certainly don't have some inherent right to not be taxed.
Well, North Korea has officially said "Wait and See".
Apparently the supreme, glorious little runt doesn't like being teased, and seems to think his delusional self is exempt from parody.
If so, this would be kind of hilarious, and kind of scary ... a nation state doing this stuff because their leader tender ego is feeling bruised.
If this is North Korea, this is all about waving around the collective penis, and posturing that he has any influence on the rest of the world.
I am not disagreeing that maintaining the legacy system can be very expensive and a losing battle,
But, I've seen projects which run on for several years, and at ever increasing cost ... and sooner or later someone has to decide if they keep going or scrap it.
I've seen about 5-6 such projects get completely scrapped due to costs.
Because, and I have witnessed this several times ... the initial team guiding the project has the advice of someone who believes his pet technology can solve any problem. And the further you get into the project, the more you realize that pet technology can't even come close to doing the job.
I've seen one or two projects where within about six months, everyone except management (and the technology champion) have realized there is no way in hell the project can be done -- and then people start leaving to escape the fallout. Which then accelerates the rate at which the project fails.
And, very often, you realize the extent to which you would need to replace or retool another dozen things which integrate with the thing you're replacing --- and then you realize you need bout 10x more money than you thought.
Sometimes, you realize these things aren't just "dumb holdovers that nobody needs". Sometimes, you realize those things underly all aspects of your business, and changing them is almost impossible.
That's actually what I've seen more often.
I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't replace legacy systems. I'm saying sometimes companies discover it's a lot more expensive and difficult than believed, and can't justify the expense to keep trying.
Very often the person most loudly saying "we should modernize this" is the person who has the least insights and knowledge of the system being replaced, which means they might be talking out of their ass in terms of what is involved.
And, except for the advertising ... did anything at all change for consumers? Or is it something they could tout as the new awesomeness, while giving you the same service as before?
Did your bill drop? Did your bandwidth allocation go up?
My perception is this technology didn't improve the service sold to consumers, and neither will 5G.
It will be a marketing coup, but beyond that, none of these super awesome enhancements will be seen by the users.
So, call it whatever the hell you like. At the end of the day, you're not gonna get the benefits they claim it brings. Or if you do, it will be in limited areas which are the most profitable.
In other words ... yawn, wake me up when telcos really sell this to us.
Yeah, my thinking when someone talks about modernizing legacy systems is usually ... "Have you ever actually been on a project to do this?"
In my personal experience, the older the legacy system, and the more embedded it is in your business ... the harder it is to replace.
I've been on a few projects trying to replace 25-40 year old computer systems. And pretty much all of them have been epic failures because people woefully underestimate how much work is involved, and don't fully appreciate all of the things they haven't considered until it's so far into the process to be too late to fix.
It's an admirable goal. but usually proves far more complex than the people championing it realize.
But, won't someone think of the CEOs?
Quit your whining. If they didn't have 5G to tout as the next big lie, they wouldn't be able to inflate the stock prices on the claim that something awesome is coming.
Why, if we acknowledged that 5G would give you zero net benefit over the falsely named 4G, or that it's really only 3G ... then how could we increase executive compensation packages?
Just think of all those poor, starving telecom CEOs who need to be able to forecast a rosy picture to the analysts to make it sound like something cool is coming.
Why, with the advent of 5G we can tell you how much more you can do with your mobile phone, and we can expand our customer base, pump the value of the stock, and increase shareholder value and increase executive compensation.
It's only after that we'll cry poor and say we can't afford to give you what we promised.
Why do you hate America?
5G is clearly 25% better than 4G, and 66% better than 3G so -- stop standing in the way of progress.
Shut up with your facts. :-P
I kind of got the impression most things being called 4G weren't even properly that.
So now we'll have a rollout of something called 5G which isn't?
Know what I expect? We won't see faster, we won't suddenly see a lot of additional bandwidth. For promotional purposes it's fast and awesome ... and for practical purposes the carriers will scale it back because they're incapable of selling you what they will claim it to be.
I simply don't believe the carriers will be able to deploy what this thing could be theoretically. All they'll do it repackage the same shitty service and charge extra for it, while crying poor about how they can't keep up with the bandwidth demands.
Because telcos are lying, greedy bastards who put more effort into marketing than quality of their product.
They've been telling us how awesome their network speeds are for over a decade. And they've been unwilling to live up to that the entire time.
Case in point: Unlimited data plans, which are so much marketing bullshit it's not funny.
Well, since you come here to Slashdot and have a low UID, you should understand something by now:
Most people believe that accounting is the art of fudging your books to look like how you want it to appear, and hide as much money so it can be funneled into executive bonuses, kick back schemes, and hookers.
Something has to happen to sustain that $30 billion in net worth held by Jeff Bezos.
In general we put about must expectation of truth coming out of corporate accounting as we do beer coming out of city tap water -- because corporations are awfully good at chicanery and concealing the truth when it comes to accounting. Especially any multi-national corporation, or one which makes movies and music. We don't always take "lost money" to mean lost money in the same way we mean it.
So, while I'm not saying you are a lying, deceptive bastard who is skilled in the art of hiding money ... I will say that in general I think that corporate accounting is, in fact, dominated by people who are lying, deceptive bastards skilled in the art of hiding money, and that what shows as a loss this quarter isn't necessarily one. ;-)
Bah, knowing about Hollywood accounting, offshore tax shelters, and everything else ... I mostly don't believe corporations when they say this.
Did they lose money, or did they run a shell game to move around money to make it look like they lost money?
These days, it's highly profitable to "lose" money when you have a network of wholly-owned subsidiaries who can charge you crazy rates to replace the toilet paper.
I'm not saying they didn't actually lose money. But corporations are awfully good at not making money on paper.
Either way, I bet executive compensation and bonuses was at record highs. Probably slightly larger than the amount of money they claim to have lost.
Well, let's think about this:
They're saying eighth generation.
So, just maybe, they're not saying "ZOMG, we invented teh automation bitches" ... and what they're actually saying is "after several iterations, these have gotten better and more efficient".
Since Amazon isn't saying what they have is new, or especially innovative ... maybe it's still interesting?
Come on, really? In a story about exoplanets you can't even spell exoplanet??
Well, the mechanics of running a scam don't actually require you to learn anything about the pretend science.
Find gullible people. Sell them something which costs you nothing at a huge profit. Run like hell before the law shows up.
Snake oil selling 101.
Double extra bonus points if you can find something like homeopathy which is apparently legal.
Since all the pretend "medicines" are diluted beyond the point of having any trace of anything, you just fill a bunch of different jars with tap water and practice your mumbo-jumbo speeches, and your sales pitch -- Why yes, Mr. Smith, we should move you to a dosage which has even less in it, because it will be stronger .. unfortunately, it is also far more costly to produce.
I guess you could find another charlatan willing to train you and accredit you in the preparation of fake medicine, but I'm not sure I see the point. Though, I guess the plaque on the wall and the ability to remember that you're supposed to be using tincture of monkey butt to treat a specific ailment might help you in case your marks have read up a little on the topic.
And you can probably have a pretty good side business selling healing crystals, patchouli, and new age books.
Of course, that might be a lot of work and paperwork, so setting up a Ponzi scheme could work too. :-P
Fair comment ...
I actually have a relative who is a schizophrenic, have known my share of people seriously affected by mental illness and/or homelessness, and have known a couple of people who were on antipsychotics.
You're right, it's a disservice to them to compare them to Bennett.
Well, think of it as being two distinct phases.
First, you rendezvouz with the comet. That's an extraordinary feat, and worked brilliantly. It represents several firsts, because matching speed with a comet and being in the same place it's supposed to be in 10 years? That's pretty damned hard to do.
Second you fire the lander portion at the comet and hope it sticks. And it has to stick to an object you aren't 100% sure of its shape, rate of spin, and composition. And it has to do it by itself because of the communication delay.
Which seems kind of like trying to tell a blind person when to cross the street based on your out-dated video view of the street, and no idea what the future traffic is going to be.
The part that failed was the "OK, you're mostly kinda pointing across the busy highway ... now start running when you get this and let us know when you get to the other side".
And in an interview I heard with one of the project members before the final landing ... they knew damned well that was kind of a high risk thing, and was being done completely blind.
So, the huge task of making rendezvous was pretty much textbook.
The blindfolded-on-a-moving-train "Annie Oakley" sharp shooting bit? Surprisingly, quite difficult.
Hmmm ... but ouchebag just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Nah, more like the crazy homeless guy on the corner screaming at the passing cars.
Nobody actually cares what he's saying, they just want him gone, and can't understand why nobody is doing anything about it.
Nobody needs to ask Bennet what he thinks.
When he decides the world needs another of his missives, it simply happens ... and the pearls of wisdom appear, like semen dribbling out of a discarded condom in a dirty alley.
Let's face it, it is a merchandising excuse.
Di$ney will have fresh Star Wars everything on sale.
The movie will be guaranteed to have some cloyingly cute character which can be marketed to kids.
Taco Bell and McDonalds will have special toys.
They'l re-re-re-re-release extended cuts or special editions of the damned movies.
Little children will have R2D2 pyjamas and underpants. And diapers. And sippy cups. And hats. And halloween costumes.
Disney will eventually put out 9 more movies, of ever diminishing artistic merit.
There will be friggin' Ewok porn.
I'm nostalgic about the first series. I mostly liked the second series but it had some issues.
But I tried to watch Episode I with my wife, and within five minutes of Jar Jar Binks appearing on screen she said "if he's in the rest of this film I'm leaving". So now if I want to watch it I'm on my own, and the pod racer scene is mostly how I calibrate my home theater.
I honestly can't decide if I will see this or not.
But let's not for a minute pretend this is being done for any reason besides the zillions of dollars Disney expects to wring from this franchise.
If they were doing a billion a year in merchandising for Cars years after it was released, you won't believe the marketing blitz which will accompany this.
You know, as much as a lot of people are looking at this as a failure, I look at this as a reminder of just how damned difficult this kind of stuff is.
What was it? Ten years in transit, several slingshots around planets to build up speed, deep hibernation for something like two years, waking up, finding where it is in space, find the damned comet, get close to it, and the launch the landing bits and pray that it works because it's all automated.
It really really sucks that this didn't play out as everyone hoped.
But it's mind boggling how many things went utterly right before one thing went wrong.
My mind boggles over the sheer amount of engineering on this which actually worked, and the massive number of things which are lurking to go wrong.
It's hard to even think of an analogy for this ... jumping out of a plane without a parachute and landing in a moving convertible which someone told you 10 years would be passing through the middle of Kansas somewhere around noon ... while blindfolded, knitting a sweater,assembling a piano, and juggling sharks. :-P
And, that might not even come close.
Ug get ripped off by greedy lawyer. Spend rest of life living under bridge.