There is also no reason to expect that they would.
Yes there is. One is the fact that they exist around the world in various places, such as my home town and places in France where I have lived. I've observed that such laws are more common than not, especially in areas with snow (and snow plows). I'm fairly sure that Germany isn't in a tropical zone so one could expect similar laws there as well.
In fact in any area of the world that recognizes the right of citizens to make laws against eyesores (such as parking your car on your lawn, or leaving your bike sitting around for extended periods) is going to have such laws. They may not be ubiquitous, but they're certainly common.
It's called an comparison, and you know it. It's reasonable to expect that certain types of laws might be similar in other parts of the world. I lived in France for two years and there were similar laws there in certain areas. There is no reason to expect that Germany might not have similar laws.
But (as you well know) that wasn't the point. The point is that it isn't very civic minded for a company to leave their stuff all over the city without some sort of compensation to the city.
when you park a car on a public street, and lock the doors, you must be abondoning that fine set of wheels, I guess, right?
Well, in my town, we have an ordinance that allows the town to tow your car if you park it on the street overnight. They don't usually enforce this until about a week has passed, but the point is still made. I'd imagine the company isn't taking the bikes back to their warehouse every night for storage.
The original poster's point is still valid. This company is using the city streets as their personal retail space. No taxes, nothing. This is like a company parking "cars" around the city with vending machines conveniently located on the passenger side. They're creating a retail space that isn't their property.
It's abusing a priviledge of convenience that has been given to all. When a single company abuses it, then it becomes detrimental to all.
Many companies use a resume system that includes search capabilities. Said systems should support PDF but often do not. That's why they require Word. In a company that doesn't use such a system, then if the secretary can double click and it opens and they can print, then it works. PDF or whatever.
This means that the student may know the scientific method or 12x12, but not why or the reasoning behing it.
Which is something that teachers can't seem to do anyway. The "teaching to the test" argument just doesn't fly with me. In life, there are some things that they just need to know. Kids need to know what 12x12 is.
My father was a teacher and all I ever heard from him and all his teacher friends was complaints about the problems with the school system was someone else's fault. They never wanted to take responsibility for the failures of the system.
Problem is, there was no accountability. How exactly does a teacher "fail"? Everyone else in our society has some sort of performance metric. A teacher can always blame someone else, the students, the administration, the parents. It can never *gasp* be poor teaching.
We *need* standardized tests so we can find the bad teachers. We need to start getting rid of bad teachers. We need to start firing them left and right. They need some fire put under them to perform. Teachers need to join the rest of the "scared to get fired" world.
Finally, you shouldn't consider sporting equipment and a sports facility as something that is wrong. Remember, the school is also spending time teaching the students fitness and living a healthy lifestyle. It's probably just as important as learning Calculus, or learning about Chaucer, or the Norman invasion of 1066.
Not really. Physical fitness can be taught out in the back field. Most of the world's best athletes grew up in tough conditions. You certainly don't need state of the art equipment for kids to get the point that being fit is a good thing. In fact, one could argue the opposite, that giving kids all that equipment leads them to believe that they need lots of expensive stuff to stay fit, when all they need is a road and some shoes.
And like it or not, Calculus is *very* important. Probably one of the most important ideas of our time. A lot more important than dodgeball.
Super smart computers which can fix anything. Revolutionary!
Just imagine producing complex models in bio-chemistry or designing a chip would be so very much easier with a machine to fix stuff whenever the need be.
And computers that write and produce sitcoms! That *would* be awesome.
For instance, what does an extremely poor nation decide regarding child labor? Their circumstances might dictate that 18 is an unrealistic age of majority, despite whatever moral objections may come from American observers.
These laws have evolved over time, balancing public and private interests along the way.
The balance has been fought over things like 14, 16 or 18 as an appropriate age for working. Not whether child labor is a good idea or not. I thought I made the point that the details aren't important to me. It's the major issues that are. Let's not argue over peanuts.
Again, basic labor laws like a standard work week, overtime, child labor, union rights, safe workplace, etc. are what are important. And I don't think you or anyone else can argue that these things are simply a question of "cultural circumstances".
The labour laws that are applied in the west were "fought" for. Many people died in the workplace or wrestled with wages below the cost of living for many many years before we got to where they are today.
There is a difference today from back then. Today there *is* a 1st world. Back then, when the west had 3rd world conditions, there was no 1st world to suck money from. The labor laws of the west are what created the consumer market. Without decent wages for the masses to spend on goods, there isn't much point in mass production.
Another difference is ease of transport. Back when the west was building its economy, transportation was quite a different beast. Now, location is almost unimportant. The countries of the 3rd world know that if they start passing labor laws, companies will quickly move somewhere else. The 3rd world isn't going to change for a long time.
We are all better off if we all share in the pie.
It's our pie. We created it. We should eat it. Why are we now expected to share it with the world?
Your logic is flawed. To assume that conditions are going to change in the 3rd world because they changed in the west is based on the assumption that the same forces are behind the change in the 3rd world as were behind the change in the west. It simply isn't true. The world economy is completely different today.
The plant was NOT making UCC any money and was a 'drop in the bucket' of UCC global operations.
So because they weren't making any money off the deal, they aren't responsible? I didn't know that profit margin determined liability. I don't think that is how they do it in India.
The Indian govt controlled almost 1/2 the stock.
Less than half, so they didn't control the company. UCC was in charge. They are responisible.
BTW, since you're posting as AC, then I would think that you would be able to provide sources for all your claims.
I think some Americans often get arrogant and assume that US standards should be imposed upon any country that wishes to business with us.
If American standards were imposed in Bhopal do you think that victims of this disaster would still be here 20 years later without real compensation, and a contaminated wasteland that hasn't been cleaned up? The point is that we have decided on these standards in America because we believe them to be the right way to treat *all* people. I don't see a problem with not doing business with countries that don't have our high standards, not matter how they came to those conclusions.
Many of the long standing standards (like protecting your employees, and criminal negligence) that we have here in America have been around so long because are simply the "right thing to do". How can you possible argue that destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people is just a "cultural preference"? I don't care how democratic your society is, some things just aren't right.
I don't want to degrade the tragedy that these people have gone through.
However, this incident highlights that in America and the rest of the world where labor is given the respect and government protection that it deserves, companies that want to do business simply can't compete. How can any company who locates itself in a country with labor protections compete against companies that can simply *kill* their workforce by locating themselves in countries who turn a blind eye to such behavior.
The USA, and other countries with labor protection need to stop doing business with companies who take advantage of countries without proper protection. Why do we have labor laws when we allow and even *encourage* businesses to locate in places without them?
I found that working as a programmer for the campus IT department 15 hours/week and volunteering as a lead sysadmin for a student government / organization webserver to be far more relevent to the job then anything I learned in class.
While experience is probably the most important reason for success, I have found that developers who believe that they "learned nothing of value in class" tend to write poor code. Two people with the same degree from the same university writing the same program: The one who values his degree will write much more maintainable and smaller code.
Computer Science degrees are "learn by example" degrees. While you're in all those classes learning about Networks, Vision, Robotics, etc., you're supposed to be learning how to write good software by seriously thinking about your professors' comments and critisism. Those who don't value their degrees tend to be those who didn't value their professors, or listen to them.
The "word processor is stupid" idea is narrow minded. True, for certain classes of documents, TeX is a better way to do things. But isn't perfect either. The referenced article talks about the two phases of preparing documents, composition and typesetting. Composition is about the words and typesetting is about the "look" of the document. The problem is that TeX is horrible at the second step. True, it makes great looking documents "out of the box", but if I decide that the default look isn't what I want, then it is far too difficult to change it. Where is the tool that allows me to change the format as I like? Every TeX article I read basically says, "If you don't like it, you're wrong." Certainly not a very user-friendly attitude to have.
The other problem is that many word processors are very useful for those cases when the text composition isn't really important, but formatting is the key point, like a sign for my garage sale. Have you ever tried do something like that in TeX?
Don't get me wrong, I use LaTeX all the time, but only for very specific types of documents. It just doesn't work for the majority of stuff that I need to do.
Re:authorized downloads with ads inserted?
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
I've been wondering for a long time why they don't simply set up a well-working torrent tracker that serves torrents with real, paid ads inserted in the material. This should work great for TV-based media, which is mostly prepared for hosting ads anyway.
I would certainly download from here. While I don't have a whole lot of fear of *actually* getting sued for downloading from tvtorrents, it would be nice to know that I wasn't going to get sued for doing so. Hell, I can watch ads, I just don't want to have to wait for reruns when I miss an episode.
Yes, I have a large number of emails. But I don't see how that should make any difference. I don't have MILLIONS of emails, which is the only thing that could do something like that.
If they're caching to RAM instead of to disk for IMAP and other such things, then it *certainly* isn't lean and mean.
I'm just waiting for the thunderbird folks to create an *actual* lean and mean version of thunderbird. It currently is using 34 MEGS of RAM just to sit and wait for mail to come in.
I thought firefox (currently using 55 MEGS of RAM) and thunderbird were supposed to be "lean and mean"?
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
But who is using it? How is your average Joe supposed to know about such products? Who is trying to market this stuff to the people at Best Buy?
The answer is no one. Joe needs a commercial on Monday Night Football to find out about such things. A problem with pure open source projects is that there isn't really an incentive for people to market the product. A developer base hostile the whole idea makes it even harder.
Can you imagine the response if I started trying to sell/market KnoppMyth? Not to mention I would probably get sued. Where is the incentive for *anyone* to try to market the Linux Media Center to the world?
Slashdot Mirror
There is also no reason to expect that they would.
Yes there is. One is the fact that they exist around the world in various places, such as my home town and places in France where I have lived. I've observed that such laws are more common than not, especially in areas with snow (and snow plows). I'm fairly sure that Germany isn't in a tropical zone so one could expect similar laws there as well.
In fact in any area of the world that recognizes the right of citizens to make laws against eyesores (such as parking your car on your lawn, or leaving your bike sitting around for extended periods) is going to have such laws. They may not be ubiquitous, but they're certainly common.
It's called an comparison, and you know it. It's reasonable to expect that certain types of laws might be similar in other parts of the world. I lived in France for two years and there were similar laws there in certain areas. There is no reason to expect that Germany might not have similar laws.
But (as you well know) that wasn't the point. The point is that it isn't very civic minded for a company to leave their stuff all over the city without some sort of compensation to the city.
when you park a car on a public street, and lock the doors, you must be abondoning that fine set of wheels, I guess, right?
Well, in my town, we have an ordinance that allows the town to tow your car if you park it on the street overnight. They don't usually enforce this until about a week has passed, but the point is still made. I'd imagine the company isn't taking the bikes back to their warehouse every night for storage.
The original poster's point is still valid. This company is using the city streets as their personal retail space. No taxes, nothing. This is like a company parking "cars" around the city with vending machines conveniently located on the passenger side. They're creating a retail space that isn't their property.
It's abusing a priviledge of convenience that has been given to all. When a single company abuses it, then it becomes detrimental to all.
Your post shows a complete lack of understanding of DNA completely. Please don't post about this again.
Many companies use a resume system that includes search capabilities. Said systems should support PDF but often do not. That's why they require Word. In a company that doesn't use such a system, then if the secretary can double click and it opens and they can print, then it works. PDF or whatever.
And leave your elitist academic arrogant shit in the pissing match you call a profession.
Academia just isn't as important to humanity as you think. Join the rest of us in the real world.
No, no, and hell no. As a student, you are a student.
TRANSLATION: I am professor, worship or die!
This means that the student may know the scientific method or 12x12, but not why or the reasoning behing it.
Which is something that teachers can't seem to do anyway. The "teaching to the test" argument just doesn't fly with me. In life, there are some things that they just need to know. Kids need to know what 12x12 is.
My father was a teacher and all I ever heard from him and all his teacher friends was complaints about the problems with the school system was someone else's fault. They never wanted to take responsibility for the failures of the system.
Problem is, there was no accountability. How exactly does a teacher "fail"? Everyone else in our society has some sort of performance metric. A teacher can always blame someone else, the students, the administration, the parents. It can never *gasp* be poor teaching.
We *need* standardized tests so we can find the bad teachers. We need to start getting rid of bad teachers. We need to start firing them left and right. They need some fire put under them to perform. Teachers need to join the rest of the "scared to get fired" world.
Finally, you shouldn't consider sporting equipment and a sports facility as something that is wrong. Remember, the school is also spending time teaching the students fitness and living a healthy lifestyle. It's probably just as important as learning Calculus, or learning about Chaucer, or the Norman invasion of 1066.
Not really. Physical fitness can be taught out in the back field. Most of the world's best athletes grew up in tough conditions. You certainly don't need state of the art equipment for kids to get the point that being fit is a good thing. In fact, one could argue the opposite, that giving kids all that equipment leads them to believe that they need lots of expensive stuff to stay fit, when all they need is a road and some shoes.
And like it or not, Calculus is *very* important. Probably one of the most important ideas of our time. A lot more important than dodgeball.
Wow, just imagine!
Super smart computers which can fix anything. Revolutionary!
Just imagine producing complex models in bio-chemistry or designing a chip would be so very much easier with a machine to fix stuff whenever the need be.
And computers that write and produce sitcoms! That *would* be awesome.
I mean, like, the sky is the limit!
For instance, what does an extremely poor nation decide regarding child labor? Their circumstances might dictate that 18 is an unrealistic age of majority, despite whatever moral objections may come from American observers.
These laws have evolved over time, balancing public and private interests along the way.
The balance has been fought over things like 14, 16 or 18 as an appropriate age for working. Not whether child labor is a good idea or not. I thought I made the point that the details aren't important to me. It's the major issues that are. Let's not argue over peanuts.
Again, basic labor laws like a standard work week, overtime, child labor, union rights, safe workplace, etc. are what are important. And I don't think you or anyone else can argue that these things are simply a question of "cultural circumstances".
The labour laws that are applied in the west were "fought" for. Many people died in the workplace or wrestled with wages below the cost of living for many many years before we got to where they are today.
There is a difference today from back then. Today there *is* a 1st world. Back then, when the west had 3rd world conditions, there was no 1st world to suck money from. The labor laws of the west are what created the consumer market. Without decent wages for the masses to spend on goods, there isn't much point in mass production.
Another difference is ease of transport. Back when the west was building its economy, transportation was quite a different beast. Now, location is almost unimportant. The countries of the 3rd world know that if they start passing labor laws, companies will quickly move somewhere else. The 3rd world isn't going to change for a long time.
We are all better off if we all share in the pie.
It's our pie. We created it. We should eat it. Why are we now expected to share it with the world?
Your logic is flawed. To assume that conditions are going to change in the 3rd world because they changed in the west is based on the assumption that the same forces are behind the change in the 3rd world as were behind the change in the west. It simply isn't true. The world economy is completely different today.
What if these companies are from the USA ?
I didn't say they aren't. Any company that takes advantage of poor laws in other countries should be stopped.
The plant was NOT making UCC any money and was a 'drop in the bucket' of UCC global operations.
So because they weren't making any money off the deal, they aren't responsible? I didn't know that profit margin determined liability. I don't think that is how they do it in India.
The Indian govt controlled almost 1/2 the stock.
Less than half, so they didn't control the company. UCC was in charge. They are responisible.
BTW, since you're posting as AC, then I would think that you would be able to provide sources for all your claims.
Patiently waiting,
Mr. McGibby
I think some Americans often get arrogant and assume that US standards should be imposed upon any country that wishes to business with us.
If American standards were imposed in Bhopal do you think that victims of this disaster would still be here 20 years later without real compensation, and a contaminated wasteland that hasn't been cleaned up? The point is that we have decided on these standards in America because we believe them to be the right way to treat *all* people. I don't see a problem with not doing business with countries that don't have our high standards, not matter how they came to those conclusions.
Many of the long standing standards (like protecting your employees, and criminal negligence) that we have here in America have been around so long because are simply the "right thing to do". How can you possible argue that destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people is just a "cultural preference"? I don't care how democratic your society is, some things just aren't right.
I don't want to degrade the tragedy that these people have gone through.
However, this incident highlights that in America and the rest of the world where labor is given the respect and government protection that it deserves, companies that want to do business simply can't compete. How can any company who locates itself in a country with labor protections compete against companies that can simply *kill* their workforce by locating themselves in countries who turn a blind eye to such behavior.
The USA, and other countries with labor protection need to stop doing business with companies who take advantage of countries without proper protection. Why do we have labor laws when we allow and even *encourage* businesses to locate in places without them?
I found that working as a programmer for the campus IT department 15 hours/week and volunteering as a lead sysadmin for a student government / organization webserver to be far more relevent to the job then anything I learned in class.
While experience is probably the most important reason for success, I have found that developers who believe that they "learned nothing of value in class" tend to write poor code. Two people with the same degree from the same university writing the same program: The one who values his degree will write much more maintainable and smaller code.
Computer Science degrees are "learn by example" degrees. While you're in all those classes learning about Networks, Vision, Robotics, etc., you're supposed to be learning how to write good software by seriously thinking about your professors' comments and critisism. Those who don't value their degrees tend to be those who didn't value their professors, or listen to them.
The "word processor is stupid" idea is narrow minded. True, for certain classes of documents, TeX is a better way to do things. But isn't perfect either. The referenced article talks about the two phases of preparing documents, composition and typesetting. Composition is about the words and typesetting is about the "look" of the document. The problem is that TeX is horrible at the second step. True, it makes great looking documents "out of the box", but if I decide that the default look isn't what I want, then it is far too difficult to change it. Where is the tool that allows me to change the format as I like? Every TeX article I read basically says, "If you don't like it, you're wrong." Certainly not a very user-friendly attitude to have.
The other problem is that many word processors are very useful for those cases when the text composition isn't really important, but formatting is the key point, like a sign for my garage sale. Have you ever tried do something like that in TeX?
Don't get me wrong, I use LaTeX all the time, but only for very specific types of documents. It just doesn't work for the majority of stuff that I need to do.
This is awesome because of the technical merits, but also because the developer isn't your run of the mill parent-mooching-freak.
She's an attractive woman.
And, no, she doesn't want to date you.
I've been wondering for a long time why they don't simply set up a well-working torrent tracker that serves torrents with real, paid ads inserted in the material. This should work great for TV-based media, which is mostly prepared for hosting ads anyway.
I would certainly download from here. While I don't have a whole lot of fear of *actually* getting sued for downloading from tvtorrents, it would be nice to know that I wasn't going to get sued for doing so. Hell, I can watch ads, I just don't want to have to wait for reruns when I miss an episode.
I *am* using 1.0PR
Yes, I have a large number of emails. But I don't see how that should make any difference. I don't have MILLIONS of emails, which is the only thing that could do something like that.
If they're caching to RAM instead of to disk for IMAP and other such things, then it *certainly* isn't lean and mean.
I'm just waiting for the thunderbird folks to create an *actual* lean and mean version of thunderbird. It currently is using 34 MEGS of RAM just to sit and wait for mail to come in.
I thought firefox (currently using 55 MEGS of RAM) and thunderbird were supposed to be "lean and mean"?
Last time I looked you had quite a bit of say on who gains power in Iraq.
Attacking the analogy of an argument instead of the actual argument is not logical. Please stop. It's annoying.
FROM THE FAQ:
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/3/04
But who is using it? How is your average Joe supposed to know about such products? Who is trying to market this stuff to the people at Best Buy?
The answer is no one. Joe needs a commercial on Monday Night Football to find out about such things. A problem with pure open source projects is that there isn't really an incentive for people to market the product. A developer base hostile the whole idea makes it even harder.
Can you imagine the response if I started trying to sell/market KnoppMyth? Not to mention I would probably get sued. Where is the incentive for *anyone* to try to market the Linux Media Center to the world?