I think yahoo's problem is not that you can't make money in portals, it's that all the tech companies have become bloated and lethargic, as happens in every economic boom. It's just time for them to trim the fat out of their organization. Companies becoming 'lean and mean' instead of the current fat-and-happy in this recession is what will lead to the next economic boom. It's just the nature of the business cycle.
I'm sure you understand economics much better than Warren Buffett
It was said earlier, Buffett makes a good deal of money from his Insurance company holdings. Insurance companies that sell 'estate tax insurance'. Thus very obvious reasons for him to oppose the end to the estate tax. No?
Who's been the biggest beneficiary of the US government's actions as of late?
Why that would be those who get subsidized heating oil, food stamps, and diapers for their little brats they shouldn't have had because they knew they couldn't afford them. Based on the amount paid in vs. benefits recieved the lazy, unproductive leaches of society (i.e. the unworking poor) are certainly the biggest beneficiaries.
dividends and increased share prices, which are already taxed at a lower rate than earned income.
BZZT! wrong! 'Capital gains' is taxed at 20%, thats' after the corporation pay's its tax rate of 36%, an effective tax rate of ~50%
When will people like you realize that punishing the productive of society (i.e. the rich) while rewarding the unproductive (i.e. the poor) taken to it's logical conclusion results in a society where everyone is unproductive and society crumbles.
Get a fucking job like the rest of us busting our asses to get ahead.
There's a reference to it in 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home', and in 'First Contact' picard is quoted as saying 'money doesn't exist in the twenty-fourth century'. Various refrences to it in most of the series. The only ones portrayed as interested in money are the ferengi who are also portrayed as liars and cheats.
Liquid Hydrogen does not occur naturally here on earth. The most natural state of hydrogen is as a component of water. And when it's burned it turns back to water. Even with a 100% efficient process it takes as much or more energy to create liquid hydrogen as the liquid hydrogen itself has the potential to create. Therefore it's not polution free, the polution is simply pushed off to some other source that generates the hydrogen, such as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
So I wish I could stop hearing how burning liquid hydrogen is our savior as unlimited pollution free energy.
We must overthrow the tyranical captialist who makes us work at gunpoint and forces us to take their money in payment to perpetuate the capitalist system.
We will overthrow capitalism and install a perfect socialist society where we can all comment on how great Ralph Nader is and we can all make ice cream together. Our society does not need money, because Star Trek told us so. Some people will do the dirty work like being garbage men because they love our society and our fellow man so much that they don't mind smelling like rotting sealife.
Meanwhile we can live in the trees and eat small nuts and berries and save all the plants and animals, even the ones that eat us sometimes.
Thinking back to my experience in the Florida public education system and I wonder about some things..
Why is it that history classes never covered anything after 1945 (i.e. WWII)? All the rest of american history was covered, why not modern history?
How come economics was not part of the curriculum? I can't even remember it being available at all as an elective much less a manditory course. Seems economics is pretty important to each and every american considing it's the reason we each can put food on the table and roofs over our heads.
Even basic stuff that we all need to know in the real world was never taught. How to balance a check book? How to budget our money? The implications of credit and savings?
Perhaps part of the problem is that the whole high-school has now been geared for 'college prep' when reality is that most high school students will not continue on to college.
My fondest memory of school is being sent to detention in middle school (think ~12-13 y.o.) for reading 1984 rather than paying attention to what was being taught at the time.
The implication that a multinational corporation abusing cheap labor in a poor country has only one effect (namely, providing any sort of job), is very, very stupidly simplified.
Your right. It is pretty stupidly simplified. They also build infrustructure, because they need it to transport shoes and raw materials around; they decrease unemployment by using some percentage of the population who'd otherwise be jobless; they improve the local economy, because their new factory needs to be built, their employees fed, and their goods transported. It's a pretty good deal for the host country.
But as I can tell by your nick you prefer the mass seizure of private property, and mass kill-offs of excessive or unsympathetic populations, and the forced labor and poverty of those remaining that were halmarks of soviet russia and red china. Let the populations admire bronze statues of their leaders while they stand in long lines waiting for bread huddled together because there's no heat. To the motherland comrade!
What you Nike-proponents and capitalism-freaks don't realise is that by hiring children for these tasks, Nike is perpetuating the cycle of poverty: kids who work in these factories can't get educated, and when they grow up they send their kids to these factories, ad infinitum.
Your absolutely right, how ignorant of me. Why if it wasn't for Nike these childeren would be going to clean and modern schools, wearing the latest fashions from 'The Gap', with their parents picking them up after school in their new Lexus SUV's to drive them to soccer practice!
People who grew up in the suburbs of america think the rest of the world is just like that and they are completely wrong. These childeren would either be begging in the streets, slaving away as hard or harder to scratch crops from their relatives tourtured farmland, or stealing/hooking to get enough to eat.
As for the morality of it all, Nike is giving the gift of life to childeren who would otherwise starve to death and all they ask in return is a few shoes. It is certainly not as bad as child pornography; but if you want to use that analogy.. Between the choice of that child being exploited or that child dying which of those hard choices would you choose?
Stop to think for a minute. Why are these children working for Nike? Surely their parents would rather have them playing in the yard or going to school. There is quite a simple answer these childeren work for nike because their parents cannot provide for them and they would otherwise starve.
Why can't their parents earn enough to feed them (working at Nike or otherwise)? Their countries are overpopulated, have no infrustructure, and the population is completely unskilled and uneducated; hence the amazingly low price of labor. Just by being there, Nike is improving conditions for the simple fact that they need an infrustructure to move shoes from the factories to the ports. The Nike factories are pumping american money into the local economy through payroll, supplies, and factory costs. Hell, globalization as a form of third-world aid seems to be the only kind that does any good!
People either chose to work for Nike of their own free will or are forced to work by their governments. If by their own free will then they obviously thought that working for Nike, no matter how seemingly horrible, provides them a lifestyle that is better than it was beforehand; therefore Nike is improving their life while it provides you shoes. If their government is forcing them to work at Nike then doesn't it seem more prudent to focus efforts on changing the governments to a more free society rather than attacking Nike who if they closed shop would just be replaced by someone else?
I personally challenge those people who believe that the third world is exploited by american corporations to fly to one of these third world countries and see how much worse off the people who don't work for Nike are. You cannot comment on the living conditions of these workers without seeing the living conditions of their neighbors who aren't working at Nike. I spent 3 months in Haiti, and let me tell you these people would give anything for the chance to work 18 hours a day and put food on the table.
Microsoft was one of those companies, regardless of their other faults, avoided politics in general and lobbying/donations in particular. Their competetors, such as Oracle, did a great deal of lobbying and donating to influence government officials to persue Microsoft through DOJ antitrust proceedings.
Can't fault Microsoft for not learning it's lesson. It is not a level playing field and if they can continue to stay competitive by bribing government officials they will; just like their competetors have done. So now they are looking for, and are going to get, policy against Open Source.
There is something most definately wrong with our society when large corporations are forced to bribe and influence government for their own prosperity.
On another completely unrelated note; there's a rumor that Bill Clinton, the guy who's DOJ persued the world's largest software company, may join the board of directors at Oracle, the world's second largest software company. hrm..
Redhat 7 uses non-standard C libraries and C compiler. Both are development releases, not 'stable' releases. I've seen quotes from Linus himself that RH7 as a 'development envioronment' is completely unusable. RH7 is even binary-incompatable with other Linux distributions.
Wait for 8, when hopefully redhat will correct their mistake and ship with stable versions of C libraries and C compilers.
First off, one of the most useful (powerful) parts of the CLI is the ability to pipe/redirect output. It's not that unusual to have five commands stung along to some end-result; I would not want 5 dialog boxes popping up that I then have to close.
Secondly, linking in GUI routines to CLI tools would make these programs many times larger (in disk space and memory consumption) then they already are. Something like 'cat' which is ~10 lines of C would turn into several hundred.
Third, which GUI toolkit do you standardize your CLI tools on? GK? Qt? athena? openwindows? Then you have to make assumptions on which GUI libraries are installed on a given operating system, not to mention differences between one platform and the next. The simple bintools that used to be compilable on any platform will then increase in incompatability and build complexity exponentially.
The final reason not to do this is that you then force people into a GUI environment regardless of if they want it or not. Whats the point of GUI-linked tools on system with only a serial console for instance? You end up requiring a GUI toolkit be on a system regardless of if the system needs or even supports such a thing. You force the tools to become unstable if only becsause a windowing system is inherently more complicated and therefore more likely to have problems.
Perhaps we should stop people from driving, because they might crash. Or perhaps we should make skydiving illegal cause sometimes there are accidents. We could ban expensive cars and credit cards because sometimes people don't have the sense to live within their means.
This country (U.S.) was founded on the principle that individuals have the freedom to make whatever choices they want, even if they are obviously stupid choices. You would punish all the responsible individual investors who do their due diligence when investing because of a few other individuals who 'day trade' or buy stocks on whims?
Go look at any given.com and see what percentage of stockholders are 'institutional investors' (i.e. mutual funds and banks); they are more responsible for the dot-com bubble than individuals. Perhaps you'd like to revoke their ability to invest too?
I'd like to avoid taking leaves from the european book, I'd like my country to avoid turning any more quasi-socialistic as the EU states have become.
Ricochet might be useful to users of ricochet themselves, but other people trying to use the same radio bands as ricochet are SOL.
Their original system used to run 900Mhz, with their new system running 2.4Ghz. Both of these are unlicensed public-use bands. They put up their 900Mhz/2.4Ghz repeaters everywhere and pretty much make those frequencies imposible for anyone else to use except for very short ranges (i.e. in their own homes).
I used to live up in the mountains, where I had a homebrew 2.4Ghz wireless link down into Santa clara valley for my interenet connection. Worked like a charm untill Richochet started rolling out it's test 128K service; then they flooded the 2.4Ghz band and made our equipment useless.
So, for me this is good news that ricochet will finally 'go away'. Besides, nowadays you can get nearly the same service by the cellular networks.
That's all very horrible and nasty if the state is some big bad entity, if the state is democratic then it's a whole different kettle of fish to what you envisage.
If the government came in and killed you then seized your property and redistributed it to your neighbors would it 'make it better' if it was because your neighbors voted to have it done because they were jealous of your possesions? A 'democracy' can be as tirranical as any other form of government if there are no provisions for immutable individual rights. Right of property is one of these rights, after all if you can't own food shelter or water you cannot even provide for your own survival.
capitalism shifts wealth to the wealthy
In a capitalist society each person is free to exchange the goods they own with another person for the goods that person owns. Each pary is doing it of his own free will. The reason you consistantly see the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is because some people value items they can use to create other items of more value (i.e. production machinery, computers, stocks/bonds ) while most other people trade their possesions for items that do little to create further value (i.e. beers, big-screen TV sets, cocane, lottery tickets).
I had the same benefit of the majority of other americans; I left high school with a diploma and literally nothing else. After highschool my money and went into computers, oreilly books, and keeping up with the computer/networking industry. Now I'm pretty well off, better off then a large number of americans.. But those americans chose to put their money into bars, TV's, new cars, and shopping sprees. So in a capitalist society that is why you see an 'inequality of wealth', the ultimate freedom is the freedom of stupidity, and it's the one that carries the most conequences.
All rights are tied directly to responsibilities, the more free a society the larger the responsibility each member shoulders. Not responsibility to others or society as a whole, but the responsiblity of accepting the concequences of your actions. Any form of society that removes responsibility (i.e. responsiblity to make a living for yourself in a free market) also removes rights (i.e. right to own and control property), it's inevitable! To guarantee a living for those who cannot find one on their own you must seize property from those who have sucessfully earned a living.
The problem you are alluding to is imperialism, the exploitation of a weak country by a strong country through use of force, rather than capitalism, which is the free exchange of property by willing property owners. Any government is capable of imperialism regardless of their economic system; IMHO a perfect example is Russia annexing eastern europe after WWII.
Do you think that it's pure coincidence that all the communist governments are authoritarian while the capitalist governments are (representative) democracies?
The most important tenant of capitalism is property rights (the right to own or create property, do with it as you like, and dispose or trade it as you like); the most important tenant of communism is the complete lack of property rights (anything you own or create is the property of the state and you are allowed to use it only by the grace of the state). Of course in a society where there are no property rights it's dubious if there will be any other rights. After all if the state has absolute authority over all property they have absolute authority over all the people who produce or use that property as well.
Of course communist governments have to be authoritarian, no one in their right mind would surrender their property and slave away at state-run businesses they used to own without being threatened with violence or death!
I saw the link to castro's speech. Cuba is such a workers' paradise that it's population regularly risks their lives clinging to flotsam to cross the florida straits for Miami. Cuba used to be a well-off country with a booming tourist trade; castro managed to drive the whole country into poverty with his communist government. That's communism in action!
Of course every comparison I've seen of communism/socialism vs. capitalism is unfair because inevitably socialism 'in theory' is compared to capitalism 'in practice'. If you compared both of them 'in theory' capitalism wins, both 'in practice' capitalism wins again.
If you are minding your own business and happen to see me hit by a car and turned into a vegetable does that somehow now obligate you to pay for my life support and hospital room for the rest of my life? People with AIDS have already been run over by the proverbial car.
1) The corporations are killing the continent of africa.
The corporations gave AIDS to the population of africa? nope. Africans get AIDS from eachother because of risky behavior; behavior that might be curtailed by education. There are still no drugs to prevent AIDS therefore the corporations even through inaction are not killing anyone.
2) By withholding AIDS drugs they are killing people.
AIDS is a terminal desease. AIDS drugs only prolong the inevitable. The end result regardless of what drugs are administered is the same.
This is the lamest argument. ugh. Clearly lack of any drug does not cause AIDS. If anything is peripherally related to the spread of AIDS to epidemic proportion it's lack of education. AIDS is still incurable therefore no amount of 'free drugs' is going to solve the problem. It could even be argued that availability of AIDS drugs in uneducated populations increases the spread of the AIDS epidemic as those infected live longer and therefore have more opprotunity to spread the desease to others.
If it's okay for a terrorist to kill an executive because that executive chose not to give away drugs is a very slippery slope. That argument taken far enough and a homeless person who killed you for your food home or car would be 'in the right' because you were 'too greedy' to give it to him. When you've got some one/thing making arbitrary desisions on who should be forced to give to who then you end up with a totalitarian society where you may be stripped of your property by some arbitrary decision that it be for the 'greater good of society'.
What we're noticing here is that the cost of drugs could be cut in half if marketeers and executives (who are undeniably useless to the final product) were fired.
After this comment and re-reading the slashdot article by michael I figured I'd go and look into this allegation that 66% of drug companies' money goes to sales and administrative. For Meric (NYSE:MRK) the majority of their money goes into materials and production; about three times what goes into sales & administration, and nearly as much as S&A goes into R&D. Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) spends 37% on sales and administrative (still less than half) and spends as much on R&D and manufacturing combined. These are large companies with already developed product lines (i.e. they've done the research now they are in sales mode to recoup earlier R&D costs).
Smaller companies without established product lines, such as Biogen (NASDAQ:BGEN) spend close to 66% on R&D.
'Sales & Administrative' is sort of a catch-all category anyway. Most people are familiar with what their workplace does.. How many people actually make the product the business sells. How many people at a software company are programmers? The programmers need a support staff of HR people, administative assistants, an IS department, some executives, a few marketing guys, someone to manage facilitites, a receptionist... point is that at any given business the majority of the people don't contribute directly to the product but are important nonetheless. All these people show up as 'sales and administrative' on an income statement.
Finally saying that cost would be cut in half if 'executives... were fired' is like saying the human body would be 50% more efficient if it didn't have to also provide for it's brain. The trick is that without it's brain the human body is completely useless.
But of course when we're talking about an idealogical concept such as socialism who want's to really go into details.. The devil is always in the details.
What you are describing is called "speculation" to be kind, or "gambling" to be honest.
All technological advancement is based on risk (or call it speculation or gambling). You invest a billion dollars to find a cure for AIDS. After that billion is gone you may have a cure or you may not. There's no such thing as 'sure thing' research.
If we had any number of socialist countries selling into the export market on a cost-recovery basis, with shorter workweeks and better wages, the fat cat industrialists would have seen Daddy's fortunes disappear overnight or seen risks to their lives.
The socialist countries had shorter work weeks and better wages? It comes as a suprise to me that people in soviet-russia and china make more than americans. In fact this is just plain untrue. I do believe we've all but completely opened our market to communist china and it's billions of workers. I thank them for their cheap trinkets, but I've yet to see China turn into a luxurious worker's paradise or seen the downfall of the american capitalist.
Sure do. The space race was all about military power. Build a rocket that can put a marble into orbit and you've built a rocket that can put a nuclear device on washington.
Cuba has many benefits, and it has prospered since the 1950's
Yeah, thats why all the cars there are from the 1950's and why so many of it's citizens risk their lives clinging to flotsam to cross the florida straits bound for Miami.
The drug companies used to sell drugs to the third world countries at the cost-of-manufacture. Know why they don't anymore? Because americans were angry that they had to pay more for drugs than third world countries. The drug companies used american revinues to offset R&D and administrative costs (enabling new research into newer drugs).
Americans were unhappy about this situation; they went so far as to get congress ready to pass laws encouraging re-importation of drugs allowing americans to buy drugs at third-world prices.
This is why the prices for drugs have gone up in the third world; Even when the drug companies were trying to be charitable to the less fortunate all they got was a PITA from americans who wanted something for nothing too.
Re-writing the laws now to allow anyone to take the drug companies' intelectual property is just going to make expensive experimental research much more risky for businesses, and therefore that sort of research that might cure AIDS or cancer will be curtailed drastically. No business in their right mind is going to spend billions to research a cure only to have somebody down the street copy it a week within it's invention and sell it at cost-of-manufacture while the first drug company cannot charge enough to recoup their R&D costs.
Next usual argument against drug companies is that they return so much back to their investors in profit and thats why the price of drugs is so high. Let me dispel that one this way. For every company that spends billions and ends up with a hard-on or bald-spot pill resulting in big profits for stockholders there are ten companies who each spent billions and ended up with zilch. Of course the 'payout' has to be a good amount if the chances of getting anything back at all are so low.
Any of you arguing the merits of socialism vs. capitalism just need to look at the achevements of the west vs. the east over the 50 years of the cold war. Sure both sides sent people to space and built sizable armies, which side benefited their common-man the most? The west had microwaves, TV's, cars, houses, ready amounts of food & goods, and appliances. The east had almost no non-military innovation (that they didn't steal from the west); the people lived with constant shortages, small cramped apartments with the minimum of comforts, and poor working conditions. I think I'll choose capitalism over socialism any day.
Crouching Tiger has already been released in DVD in Hong Kong (region 3). Thus it was available for 'home viewing' prior to it's theatre release in US. There are plenty of copies available on e-bay.
Slashdot Mirror
I think yahoo's problem is not that you can't make money in portals, it's that all the tech companies have become bloated and lethargic, as happens in every economic boom. It's just time for them to trim the fat out of their organization. Companies becoming 'lean and mean' instead of the current fat-and-happy in this recession is what will lead to the next economic boom. It's just the nature of the business cycle.
--Greg
I'm sure you understand economics much better than Warren Buffett
It was said earlier, Buffett makes a good deal of money from his Insurance company holdings. Insurance companies that sell 'estate tax insurance'. Thus very obvious reasons for him to oppose the end to the estate tax. No?
Who's been the biggest beneficiary of the US government's actions as of late?
Why that would be those who get subsidized heating oil, food stamps, and diapers for their little brats they shouldn't have had because they knew they couldn't afford them. Based on the amount paid in vs. benefits recieved the lazy, unproductive leaches of society (i.e. the unworking poor) are certainly the biggest beneficiaries.
dividends and increased share prices, which are already taxed at a lower rate than earned income.
BZZT! wrong! 'Capital gains' is taxed at 20%, thats' after the corporation pay's its tax rate of 36%, an effective tax rate of ~50%
When will people like you realize that punishing the productive of society (i.e. the rich) while rewarding the unproductive (i.e. the poor) taken to it's logical conclusion results in a society where everyone is unproductive and society crumbles.
Get a fucking job like the rest of us busting our asses to get ahead.
-- Greg
There's a reference to it in 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home', and in 'First Contact' picard is quoted as saying 'money doesn't exist in the twenty-fourth century'. Various refrences to it in most of the series. The only ones portrayed as interested in money are the ferengi who are also portrayed as liars and cheats.
Liquid Hydrogen does not occur naturally here on earth. The most natural state of hydrogen is as a component of water. And when it's burned it turns back to water. Even with a 100% efficient process it takes as much or more energy to create liquid hydrogen as the liquid hydrogen itself has the potential to create. Therefore it's not polution free, the polution is simply pushed off to some other source that generates the hydrogen, such as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
So I wish I could stop hearing how burning liquid hydrogen is our savior as unlimited pollution free energy.
-- Greg
You are being oppressed by the capitalist pigs.
We must overthrow the tyranical captialist who makes us work at gunpoint and forces us to take their money in payment to perpetuate the capitalist system.
We will overthrow capitalism and install a perfect socialist society where we can all comment on how great Ralph Nader is and we can all make ice cream together. Our society does not need money, because Star Trek told us so. Some people will do the dirty work like being garbage men because they love our society and our fellow man so much that they don't mind smelling like rotting sealife.
Meanwhile we can live in the trees and eat small nuts and berries and save all the plants and animals, even the ones that eat us sometimes.
Hurrah.
Thinking back to my experience in the Florida public education system and I wonder about some things..
Why is it that history classes never covered anything after 1945 (i.e. WWII)? All the rest of american history was covered, why not modern history?
How come economics was not part of the curriculum? I can't even remember it being available at all as an elective much less a manditory course. Seems economics is pretty important to each and every american considing it's the reason we each can put food on the table and roofs over our heads.
Even basic stuff that we all need to know in the real world was never taught. How to balance a check book? How to budget our money? The implications of credit and savings?
Perhaps part of the problem is that the whole high-school has now been geared for 'college prep' when reality is that most high school students will not continue on to college.
My fondest memory of school is being sent to detention in middle school (think ~12-13 y.o.) for reading 1984 rather than paying attention to what was being taught at the time.
-- Greg
The implication that a multinational corporation abusing cheap labor in a poor country has only one effect (namely, providing any sort of job), is very, very stupidly simplified.
Your right. It is pretty stupidly simplified. They also build infrustructure, because they need it to transport shoes and raw materials around; they decrease unemployment by using some percentage of the population who'd otherwise be jobless; they improve the local economy, because their new factory needs to be built, their employees fed, and their goods transported. It's a pretty good deal for the host country.
But as I can tell by your nick you prefer the mass seizure of private property, and mass kill-offs of excessive or unsympathetic populations, and the forced labor and poverty of those remaining that were halmarks of soviet russia and red china. Let the populations admire bronze statues of their leaders while they stand in long lines waiting for bread huddled together because there's no heat. To the motherland comrade!
-- Greg
If I have to choose between a sweatshop and starvation, that really isn't much of a choice, now, is it?
Sure beats the choice between starvation and starvation.
-- Greg
What you Nike-proponents and capitalism-freaks don't realise is that by hiring children for these tasks, Nike is perpetuating the cycle of poverty: kids who work in these factories can't get educated, and when they grow up they send their kids to these factories, ad infinitum.
Your absolutely right, how ignorant of me. Why if it wasn't for Nike these childeren would be going to clean and modern schools, wearing the latest fashions from 'The Gap', with their parents picking them up after school in their new Lexus SUV's to drive them to soccer practice!
People who grew up in the suburbs of america think the rest of the world is just like that and they are completely wrong. These childeren would either be begging in the streets, slaving away as hard or harder to scratch crops from their relatives tourtured farmland, or stealing/hooking to get enough to eat.
As for the morality of it all, Nike is giving the gift of life to childeren who would otherwise starve to death and all they ask in return is a few shoes. It is certainly not as bad as child pornography; but if you want to use that analogy.. Between the choice of that child being exploited or that child dying which of those hard choices would you choose?
-- Greg
Stop to think for a minute. Why are these children working for Nike? Surely their parents would rather have them playing in the yard or going to school. There is quite a simple answer these childeren work for nike because their parents cannot provide for them and they would otherwise starve.
Why can't their parents earn enough to feed them (working at Nike or otherwise)? Their countries are overpopulated, have no infrustructure, and the population is completely unskilled and uneducated; hence the amazingly low price of labor. Just by being there, Nike is improving conditions for the simple fact that they need an infrustructure to move shoes from the factories to the ports. The Nike factories are pumping american money into the local economy through payroll, supplies, and factory costs. Hell, globalization as a form of third-world aid seems to be the only kind that does any good!
People either chose to work for Nike of their own free will or are forced to work by their governments. If by their own free will then they obviously thought that working for Nike, no matter how seemingly horrible, provides them a lifestyle that is better than it was beforehand; therefore Nike is improving their life while it provides you shoes. If their government is forcing them to work at Nike then doesn't it seem more prudent to focus efforts on changing the governments to a more free society rather than attacking Nike who if they closed shop would just be replaced by someone else?
I personally challenge those people who believe that the third world is exploited by american corporations to fly to one of these third world countries and see how much worse off the people who don't work for Nike are. You cannot comment on the living conditions of these workers without seeing the living conditions of their neighbors who aren't working at Nike. I spent 3 months in Haiti, and let me tell you these people would give anything for the chance to work 18 hours a day and put food on the table.
-- Greg
Microsoft was one of those companies, regardless of their other faults, avoided politics in general and lobbying/donations in particular. Their competetors, such as Oracle, did a great deal of lobbying and donating to influence government officials to persue Microsoft through DOJ antitrust proceedings.
Can't fault Microsoft for not learning it's lesson. It is not a level playing field and if they can continue to stay competitive by bribing government officials they will; just like their competetors have done. So now they are looking for, and are going to get, policy against Open Source.
There is something most definately wrong with our society when large corporations are forced to bribe and influence government for their own prosperity.
On another completely unrelated note; there's a rumor that Bill Clinton, the guy who's DOJ persued the world's largest software company, may join the board of directors at Oracle, the world's second largest software company. hrm..
-- Greg
Redhat 7 uses non-standard C libraries and C compiler. Both are development releases, not 'stable' releases. I've seen quotes from Linus himself that RH7 as a 'development envioronment' is completely unusable. RH7 is even binary-incompatable with other Linux distributions.
Wait for 8, when hopefully redhat will correct their mistake and ship with stable versions of C libraries and C compilers.
-- Greg
First off, one of the most useful (powerful) parts of the CLI is the ability to pipe/redirect output. It's not that unusual to have five commands stung along to some end-result; I would not want 5 dialog boxes popping up that I then have to close.
Secondly, linking in GUI routines to CLI tools would make these programs many times larger (in disk space and memory consumption) then they already are. Something like 'cat' which is ~10 lines of C would turn into several hundred.
Third, which GUI toolkit do you standardize your CLI tools on? GK? Qt? athena? openwindows? Then you have to make assumptions on which GUI libraries are installed on a given operating system, not to mention differences between one platform and the next. The simple bintools that used to be compilable on any platform will then increase in incompatability and build complexity exponentially.
The final reason not to do this is that you then force people into a GUI environment regardless of if they want it or not. Whats the point of GUI-linked tools on system with only a serial console for instance? You end up requiring a GUI toolkit be on a system regardless of if the system needs or even supports such a thing. You force the tools to become unstable if only becsause a windowing system is inherently more complicated and therefore more likely to have problems.
-- Greg
The new system uses 2.4Ghz for intra-cell traffic (i.e. repeater to repeater).
What?
.com and see what percentage of stockholders are 'institutional investors' (i.e. mutual funds and banks); they are more responsible for the dot-com bubble than individuals. Perhaps you'd like to revoke their ability to invest too?
Perhaps we should stop people from driving, because they might crash. Or perhaps we should make skydiving illegal cause sometimes there are accidents. We could ban expensive cars and credit cards because sometimes people don't have the sense to live within their means.
This country (U.S.) was founded on the principle that individuals have the freedom to make whatever choices they want, even if they are obviously stupid choices. You would punish all the responsible individual investors who do their due diligence when investing because of a few other individuals who 'day trade' or buy stocks on whims?
Go look at any given
I'd like to avoid taking leaves from the european book, I'd like my country to avoid turning any more quasi-socialistic as the EU states have become.
-- Greg
Ricochet might be useful to users of ricochet themselves, but other people trying to use the same radio bands as ricochet are SOL.
Their original system used to run 900Mhz, with their new system running 2.4Ghz. Both of these are unlicensed public-use bands. They put up their 900Mhz/2.4Ghz repeaters everywhere and pretty much make those frequencies imposible for anyone else to use except for very short ranges (i.e. in their own homes).
I used to live up in the mountains, where I had a homebrew 2.4Ghz wireless link down into Santa clara valley for my interenet connection. Worked like a charm untill Richochet started rolling out it's test 128K service; then they flooded the 2.4Ghz band and made our equipment useless.
So, for me this is good news that ricochet will finally 'go away'. Besides, nowadays you can get nearly the same service by the cellular networks.
-- Greg
That's all very horrible and nasty if the state is some big bad entity, if the state is democratic then it's a whole different kettle of fish to what you envisage.
If the government came in and killed you then seized your property and redistributed it to your neighbors would it 'make it better' if it was because your neighbors voted to have it done because they were jealous of your possesions? A 'democracy' can be as tirranical as any other form of government if there are no provisions for immutable individual rights. Right of property is one of these rights, after all if you can't own food shelter or water you cannot even provide for your own survival.
capitalism shifts wealth to the wealthy
In a capitalist society each person is free to exchange the goods they own with another person for the goods that person owns. Each pary is doing it of his own free will. The reason you consistantly see the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is because some people value items they can use to create other items of more value (i.e. production machinery, computers, stocks/bonds ) while most other people trade their possesions for items that do little to create further value (i.e. beers, big-screen TV sets, cocane, lottery tickets).
I had the same benefit of the majority of other americans; I left high school with a diploma and literally nothing else. After highschool my money and went into computers, oreilly books, and keeping up with the computer/networking industry. Now I'm pretty well off, better off then a large number of americans.. But those americans chose to put their money into bars, TV's, new cars, and shopping sprees. So in a capitalist society that is why you see an 'inequality of wealth', the ultimate freedom is the freedom of stupidity, and it's the one that carries the most conequences.
All rights are tied directly to responsibilities, the more free a society the larger the responsibility each member shoulders. Not responsibility to others or society as a whole, but the responsiblity of accepting the concequences of your actions. Any form of society that removes responsibility (i.e. responsiblity to make a living for yourself in a free market) also removes rights (i.e. right to own and control property), it's inevitable! To guarantee a living for those who cannot find one on their own you must seize property from those who have sucessfully earned a living.
The problem you are alluding to is imperialism, the exploitation of a weak country by a strong country through use of force, rather than capitalism, which is the free exchange of property by willing property owners. Any government is capable of imperialism regardless of their economic system; IMHO a perfect example is Russia annexing eastern europe after WWII.
-- Greg
Do you think that it's pure coincidence that all the communist governments are authoritarian while the capitalist governments are (representative) democracies?
The most important tenant of capitalism is property rights (the right to own or create property, do with it as you like, and dispose or trade it as you like); the most important tenant of communism is the complete lack of property rights (anything you own or create is the property of the state and you are allowed to use it only by the grace of the state). Of course in a society where there are no property rights it's dubious if there will be any other rights. After all if the state has absolute authority over all property they have absolute authority over all the people who produce or use that property as well.
Of course communist governments have to be authoritarian, no one in their right mind would surrender their property and slave away at state-run businesses they used to own without being threatened with violence or death!
I saw the link to castro's speech. Cuba is such a workers' paradise that it's population regularly risks their lives clinging to flotsam to cross the florida straits for Miami. Cuba used to be a well-off country with a booming tourist trade; castro managed to drive the whole country into poverty with his communist government. That's communism in action!
Of course every comparison I've seen of communism/socialism vs. capitalism is unfair because inevitably socialism 'in theory' is compared to capitalism 'in practice'. If you compared both of them 'in theory' capitalism wins, both 'in practice' capitalism wins again.
-- Greg
If you are minding your own business and happen to see me hit by a car and turned into a vegetable does that somehow now obligate you to pay for my life support and hospital room for the rest of my life? People with AIDS have already been run over by the proverbial car.
The holes in your argument:
1) The corporations are killing the continent of africa.
The corporations gave AIDS to the population of africa? nope. Africans get AIDS from eachother because of risky behavior; behavior that might be curtailed by education. There are still no drugs to prevent AIDS therefore the corporations even through inaction are not killing anyone.
2) By withholding AIDS drugs they are killing people.
AIDS is a terminal desease. AIDS drugs only prolong the inevitable. The end result regardless of what drugs are administered is the same.
This is the lamest argument. ugh. Clearly lack of any drug does not cause AIDS. If anything is peripherally related to the spread of AIDS to epidemic proportion it's lack of education. AIDS is still incurable therefore no amount of 'free drugs' is going to solve the problem. It could even be argued that availability of AIDS drugs in uneducated populations increases the spread of the AIDS epidemic as those infected live longer and therefore have more opprotunity to spread the desease to others.
If it's okay for a terrorist to kill an executive because that executive chose not to give away drugs is a very slippery slope. That argument taken far enough and a homeless person who killed you for your food home or car would be 'in the right' because you were 'too greedy' to give it to him. When you've got some one/thing making arbitrary desisions on who should be forced to give to who then you end up with a totalitarian society where you may be stripped of your property by some arbitrary decision that it be for the 'greater good of society'.
-- Greg
What we're noticing here is that the cost of drugs could be cut in half if marketeers and executives (who are undeniably useless to the final product) were fired.
... were fired' is like saying the human body would be 50% more efficient if it didn't have to also provide for it's brain. The trick is that without it's brain the human body is completely useless.
After this comment and re-reading the slashdot article by michael I figured I'd go and look into this allegation that 66% of drug companies' money goes to sales and administrative. For Meric (NYSE:MRK) the majority of their money goes into materials and production; about three times what goes into sales & administration, and nearly as much as S&A goes into R&D. Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) spends 37% on sales and administrative (still less than half) and spends as much on R&D and manufacturing combined. These are large companies with already developed product lines (i.e. they've done the research now they are in sales mode to recoup earlier R&D costs).
Smaller companies without established product lines, such as Biogen (NASDAQ:BGEN) spend close to 66% on R&D.
'Sales & Administrative' is sort of a catch-all category anyway. Most people are familiar with what their workplace does.. How many people actually make the product the business sells. How many people at a software company are programmers? The programmers need a support staff of HR people, administative assistants, an IS department, some executives, a few marketing guys, someone to manage facilitites, a receptionist... point is that at any given business the majority of the people don't contribute directly to the product but are important nonetheless. All these people show up as 'sales and administrative' on an income statement.
Finally saying that cost would be cut in half if 'executives
But of course when we're talking about an idealogical concept such as socialism who want's to really go into details.. The devil is always in the details.
What you are describing is called "speculation" to be kind, or "gambling" to be honest.
All technological advancement is based on risk (or call it speculation or gambling). You invest a billion dollars to find a cure for AIDS. After that billion is gone you may have a cure or you may not. There's no such thing as 'sure thing' research.
If we had any number of socialist countries selling into the export market on a cost-recovery basis, with shorter workweeks and better wages, the fat cat industrialists would have seen Daddy's fortunes disappear overnight or seen risks to their lives.
The socialist countries had shorter work weeks and better wages? It comes as a suprise to me that people in soviet-russia and china make more than americans. In fact this is just plain untrue. I do believe we've all but completely opened our market to communist china and it's billions of workers. I thank them for their cheap trinkets, but I've yet to see China turn into a luxurious worker's paradise or seen the downfall of the american capitalist.
-- Greg
Remember Spitnik?
Sure do. The space race was all about military power. Build a rocket that can put a marble into orbit and you've built a rocket that can put a nuclear device on washington.
Cuba has many benefits, and it has prospered since the 1950's
Yeah, thats why all the cars there are from the 1950's and why so many of it's citizens risk their lives clinging to flotsam to cross the florida straits bound for Miami.
The drug companies used to sell drugs to the third world countries at the cost-of-manufacture. Know why they don't anymore? Because americans were angry that they had to pay more for drugs than third world countries. The drug companies used american revinues to offset R&D and administrative costs (enabling new research into newer drugs).
Americans were unhappy about this situation; they went so far as to get congress ready to pass laws encouraging re-importation of drugs allowing americans to buy drugs at third-world prices.
This is why the prices for drugs have gone up in the third world; Even when the drug companies were trying to be charitable to the less fortunate all they got was a PITA from americans who wanted something for nothing too.
Re-writing the laws now to allow anyone to take the drug companies' intelectual property is just going to make expensive experimental research much more risky for businesses, and therefore that sort of research that might cure AIDS or cancer will be curtailed drastically. No business in their right mind is going to spend billions to research a cure only to have somebody down the street copy it a week within it's invention and sell it at cost-of-manufacture while the first drug company cannot charge enough to recoup their R&D costs.
Next usual argument against drug companies is that they return so much back to their investors in profit and thats why the price of drugs is so high. Let me dispel that one this way. For every company that spends billions and ends up with a hard-on or bald-spot pill resulting in big profits for stockholders there are ten companies who each spent billions and ended up with zilch. Of course the 'payout' has to be a good amount if the chances of getting anything back at all are so low.
Any of you arguing the merits of socialism vs. capitalism just need to look at the achevements of the west vs. the east over the 50 years of the cold war. Sure both sides sent people to space and built sizable armies, which side benefited their common-man the most? The west had microwaves, TV's, cars, houses, ready amounts of food & goods, and appliances. The east had almost no non-military innovation (that they didn't steal from the west); the people lived with constant shortages, small cramped apartments with the minimum of comforts, and poor working conditions. I think I'll choose capitalism over socialism any day.
-- Greg
Crouching Tiger has already been released in DVD in Hong Kong (region 3). Thus it was available for 'home viewing' prior to it's theatre release in US. There are plenty of copies available on e-bay.
-- Greg