'I've yet to meet an executive so far gone that he believes you can overcharge your customers and then repay the principal when you get caught. They like to be a lot more subtle than that.
It doesn't take much for executives (and people in general) to delude themselves into thinking they're doing the right thing. Executives have an ethical responsibility to do whatever is in the best interest of the stockholders. Therefore, if it means more money for stockholders for them to screw over customers with a slight possibility of getting a hand slap at some point in the future, then it is their moral responsibility to do so.
Really? Loud commercials are a huge pet peeve of me, and I'm sure many others. The media companies do it on purpose (especially any channels from Turner Broadcasting). And their excuse why they wouldn't be able to comply with the law is so laughable that it's insulting. They would have us believe that the technology doesn't exist or is prohibitively expensive/complex to design a circuit to detect and attenuate loud signals. Huh?
Advertisers want to be as annoying as possible to get your attention. If you don't enact laws to restrict them, you'll end up in a world not unlike what you see in the movie Brazil. I suppose you were also against the do-not-call registry?
And it's not like this is a 2000 page heath care law. It's a simple law to get rid of an obvious intentional annoyance. Of course it's not a perfect law....a better law would have included a provision to throw offending TV executives into the middle of the ocean. But it's the best system we've got.
Interesting turn of events. Making gold easily accessible to the "common man" could significantly increase demand for gold and continue pushing up the price to stratospheric heights. There's a lot of people who think Armageddon is right around the corner, and the only reason they haven't stocked up on gold is because you can't exactly walk into Wal-Mart to get it. It could be the next great bubble!
I think it's worse than that. "LibreOffice" sounds alot like "Liberal" to me. What executives are going to want anti-capitalism/hippie smoking/communist software in their enterprise?
They should have gone with something more patriotic/capitalist like "FreedomOffice" to cater to the business crowd.
Couldn't this be considered a good thing? If fundies have their own search engine, won't they be less likely to try to force censorship on Google? Same goes for Conservapedia....if they weren't writing their crazy articles there, wouldn't they be spending that effort trying to manipulate Wikipedia?
In some ways, it's probably a good thing that they've decided to cloister themselves in their own world and leave the rest of us alone.
I think that this is what he's trying to imply. However, that sounds like a cop-out answer. Are companies REALLY moving jobs to China instead of automating because of lawsuits? That's the first I've heard this angle, and I'm suspicious. I somehow doubt automation compares in cost to a workforce willing to work for less than 10% of their American counterparts.
Totally agree. Clean coal is nothing but a bait-and-switch con. The coal industry knows very well that there's no such thing as clean coal. It's just their way of getting people to go along with new dirty coal plants with the implied promise that one day they'll be able to make them "clean", "as soon as the technology is ready". Yea...right...
Unfortunately, people believe it because they WANT to believe it.
Exactly my thoughts. If anything, this news appears to vindicate Obama's temporary moratorium on deep-water drilling. But do you think that's how Fox News is going to present it? Instead, it's being spinned as 'maybe' the work of "liberal eco-terrorists", or an Obama administration conspiracy.
Politics does weird things to people's brains. Honestly, I find it hard to fathom that so many people (my mother included) consider Fox News to be the only true source of unbiased news. Apparently all other news organizations in the entire world are controlled by the "liberal elite". I guess it's similar to the way people believe that their religion is the only true one out of the many thousands of religions in the world, and by extreme luck they just happened to be born into the right one.
Why stop with just one layer of buses. Why not create even larger "hyper-buses" that can travel over the smaller buses? Imagine the layers of buses you could create!
Wow....I don't think I've ever seen a rant about liberals so eloquently smacked down. Kudos!
To be fair though...all societies have a "they" that gets blamed for all of societies ills....an US vs THEM attitude. It's the glue that holds society together, and makes people feel a kinship with each other. It's particularly severe in the United States because we really don't have any large enemies left.
The rumor is that there's a reason for this. Cash-rich Microsoft supposedly employs some of the best and brightest software engineers on go-nowhere projects simply to keep them out of the available workforce. Since this talent doesn't end up in competing companies, this helps them maintain their monopoly position in their cash cows.
Microsoft is not full of idiots. The saying may go "Don't explain anything by conspiracy that is more easily explained by stupidity.", but that doesn't mean the opposite isn't true every once in a while.
Interesting that people bring up Southwest as an example of capitalism in action filling a need. However, Southwest is an employee-owned company. So you could equally claim that Southwest is an example of the success of communism/socialism over "greedy capitalism". Sure it's a stretch claiming Southwest is communist/socialist, but not any more than claiming Obama is.
People seem to be missing a point here. It's been over 30 years since the song 'Down Under' was released, yet Men at Work are still able to collect royalties on it. Cry me a river if the system that allows that to happen also says they need to share their royalties with someone with an even older claim. Sounds like poetic justice to me.
I respectfully disagree. If they're telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe that they're not), then they didn't even realize they were collecting this information. They did not use it for monetary gain.
If anything, this gives me more respect for Google, since they did not have to reveal this information (they could have indefinitely stonewalled...there's no external evidence that they kept this data). They're willing to admit when they do something wrong. That scores points in my book. Kudos to Google.
Seeing so many knee-jerk Obama-is-a-facist right-wing reactions ON SLASHDOT of all places, and all modded to 5 Insightful, is downright scary. Has Fox News won the information war?
I have to disagree. IMHO, out of the 3 major cable news networks (CNN, Fox, MSNBC), CNN is the best, and appears to try to report news without a liberal or conservative slant. The problem is that unbiased news is BORING! It's much more entertaining to watch Maddow duke it out with Beck. And so their ratings are horrible.
That's not to say CNN isn't a horrible network with way too much time spent on mindless drivel, but they are the best of the worst major cable news outlets.
It's sad, but one of the best places to get real news isn't even from any of the news outlets anymore....it's from the Daily Show.
Most people still believe that just because you can legally do something, doesn't mean you should. When businesses do every sneaky, duplitious thing they can to make a buck, they push that natural tendency toward expecting civility and something resembling high-mindedness in civilized people straight into the Socialist camp.
As a Capitalist, that really offends me. If businesses want to be treated laissez faire then they damn well better learn to make society not feel like they're a bunch of crooks who care so little about the common good that if regulators aren't going Big Brother on them every nanosecond they'll steal everything that isn't nailed down and cheat everyone who isn't paying 110% attention to every detail of their lives.
It's even worse than this. It is now considered immoral to NOT do any possible sneaky duplicitous things, because the benefits to the shareholders outweigh anything else.
I could see this argument 20 years ago. But does it really matter anymore since CCs have become so ubiquitous? I hardly EVER use paper money anymore. The only time I really ever use it is for tolls, and that's only because I'm too lazy to get EZ-Pass. So it seems like a visually-impaired person should be able to get by without handling paper money at all.
Plastic money came to my mind right away too. But if you think about it, paper money could itself be considered a security feature, since it gives the money a limited lifespan. Plastic money lasts a very long time, and therefore cannot be replaced with better bills as easily.
Hey, freedom goes both ways. He's free to say it's all bullshit and he doesn't want anything but for people to fuck off and leave him alone, I'm free to voice my opinion that it's selfish and stupid.
Yes, and I'M free to voice MY opinion that YOUR opinion of him is also selfish and stupid. See how that freedom goes both ways?
I'm flabbergasted when people trot the line "I'm free to say whatever I want" as if that somehow gives credence to their stupid comments. I'm free to say that 2+2=5, but that doesn't mean I'm correct, or that you're somehow infringing on my 'freedom' by publicly disagreeing with me.
There should be something similar to Godwin's Law for people who resort to using the "I'm free to say whatever I want" argument.
Slashdot Mirror
'I've yet to meet an executive so far gone that he believes you can overcharge your customers and then repay the principal when you get caught. They like to be a lot more subtle than that.
It doesn't take much for executives (and people in general) to delude themselves into thinking they're doing the right thing. Executives have an ethical responsibility to do whatever is in the best interest of the stockholders. Therefore, if it means more money for stockholders for them to screw over customers with a slight possibility of getting a hand slap at some point in the future, then it is their moral responsibility to do so.
Really? Loud commercials are a huge pet peeve of me, and I'm sure many others. The media companies do it on purpose (especially any channels from Turner Broadcasting). And their excuse why they wouldn't be able to comply with the law is so laughable that it's insulting. They would have us believe that the technology doesn't exist or is prohibitively expensive/complex to design a circuit to detect and attenuate loud signals. Huh?
Advertisers want to be as annoying as possible to get your attention. If you don't enact laws to restrict them, you'll end up in a world not unlike what you see in the movie Brazil. I suppose you were also against the do-not-call registry?
And it's not like this is a 2000 page heath care law. It's a simple law to get rid of an obvious intentional annoyance. Of course it's not a perfect law....a better law would have included a provision to throw offending TV executives into the middle of the ocean. But it's the best system we've got.
Interesting turn of events. Making gold easily accessible to the "common man" could significantly increase demand for gold and continue pushing up the price to stratospheric heights. There's a lot of people who think Armageddon is right around the corner, and the only reason they haven't stocked up on gold is because you can't exactly walk into Wal-Mart to get it. It could be the next great bubble!
I think it's worse than that. "LibreOffice" sounds alot like "Liberal" to me. What executives are going to want anti-capitalism/hippie smoking/communist software in their enterprise?
They should have gone with something more patriotic/capitalist like "FreedomOffice" to cater to the business crowd.
Couldn't this be considered a good thing? If fundies have their own search engine, won't they be less likely to try to force censorship on Google? Same goes for Conservapedia....if they weren't writing their crazy articles there, wouldn't they be spending that effort trying to manipulate Wikipedia?
In some ways, it's probably a good thing that they've decided to cloister themselves in their own world and leave the rest of us alone.
I think that this is what he's trying to imply. However, that sounds like a cop-out answer. Are companies REALLY moving jobs to China instead of automating because of lawsuits? That's the first I've heard this angle, and I'm suspicious. I somehow doubt automation compares in cost to a workforce willing to work for less than 10% of their American counterparts.
I never really did understand what that passage was trying to say. This is how I read it:
"Only smart people will be able to figure out the number of the beast. Oh, and by the way, it's 666."
Huh?
"And what if we've picked the wrong religion? Every week we're just making God madder and madder." - Homer Simpson
Totally agree. Clean coal is nothing but a bait-and-switch con. The coal industry knows very well that there's no such thing as clean coal. It's just their way of getting people to go along with new dirty coal plants with the implied promise that one day they'll be able to make them "clean", "as soon as the technology is ready". Yea...right...
Unfortunately, people believe it because they WANT to believe it.
Exactly my thoughts. If anything, this news appears to vindicate Obama's temporary moratorium on deep-water drilling. But do you think that's how Fox News is going to present it? Instead, it's being spinned as 'maybe' the work of "liberal eco-terrorists", or an Obama administration conspiracy.
Politics does weird things to people's brains. Honestly, I find it hard to fathom that so many people (my mother included) consider Fox News to be the only true source of unbiased news. Apparently all other news organizations in the entire world are controlled by the "liberal elite". I guess it's similar to the way people believe that their religion is the only true one out of the many thousands of religions in the world, and by extreme luck they just happened to be born into the right one.
Why stop with just one layer of buses. Why not create even larger "hyper-buses" that can travel over the smaller buses? Imagine the layers of buses you could create!
Does this explain why getting married kills productivity in men? http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s900147.htm
Wow....I don't think I've ever seen a rant about liberals so eloquently smacked down. Kudos!
To be fair though...all societies have a "they" that gets blamed for all of societies ills....an US vs THEM attitude. It's the glue that holds society together, and makes people feel a kinship with each other. It's particularly severe in the United States because we really don't have any large enemies left.
The rumor is that there's a reason for this. Cash-rich Microsoft supposedly employs some of the best and brightest software engineers on go-nowhere projects simply to keep them out of the available workforce. Since this talent doesn't end up in competing companies, this helps them maintain their monopoly position in their cash cows.
Microsoft is not full of idiots. The saying may go "Don't explain anything by conspiracy that is more easily explained by stupidity.", but that doesn't mean the opposite isn't true every once in a while.
According to Future Timeline, femto-tech is not expected to come around until 2110.
By the way, if you've never seen the site, it's quite an interesting read (if perhaps a bit optimistic).
Interesting that people bring up Southwest as an example of capitalism in action filling a need. However, Southwest is an employee-owned company. So you could equally claim that Southwest is an example of the success of communism/socialism over "greedy capitalism". Sure it's a stretch claiming Southwest is communist/socialist, but not any more than claiming Obama is.
People seem to be missing a point here. It's been over 30 years since the song 'Down Under' was released, yet Men at Work are still able to collect royalties on it. Cry me a river if the system that allows that to happen also says they need to share their royalties with someone with an even older claim. Sounds like poetic justice to me.
I respectfully disagree. If they're telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe that they're not), then they didn't even realize they were collecting this information. They did not use it for monetary gain.
If anything, this gives me more respect for Google, since they did not have to reveal this information (they could have indefinitely stonewalled...there's no external evidence that they kept this data). They're willing to admit when they do something wrong. That scores points in my book. Kudos to Google.
This was exactly how it came across to me too.
Seeing so many knee-jerk Obama-is-a-facist right-wing reactions ON SLASHDOT of all places, and all modded to 5 Insightful, is downright scary. Has Fox News won the information war?
I have to disagree. IMHO, out of the 3 major cable news networks (CNN, Fox, MSNBC), CNN is the best, and appears to try to report news without a liberal or conservative slant. The problem is that unbiased news is BORING! It's much more entertaining to watch Maddow duke it out with Beck. And so their ratings are horrible.
That's not to say CNN isn't a horrible network with way too much time spent on mindless drivel, but they are the best of the worst major cable news outlets.
It's sad, but one of the best places to get real news isn't even from any of the news outlets anymore....it's from the Daily Show.
Most people still believe that just because you can legally do something, doesn't mean you should. When businesses do every sneaky, duplitious thing they can to make a buck, they push that natural tendency toward expecting civility and something resembling high-mindedness in civilized people straight into the Socialist camp.
As a Capitalist, that really offends me. If businesses want to be treated laissez faire then they damn well better learn to make society not feel like they're a bunch of crooks who care so little about the common good that if regulators aren't going Big Brother on them every nanosecond they'll steal everything that isn't nailed down and cheat everyone who isn't paying 110% attention to every detail of their lives.
It's even worse than this. It is now considered immoral to NOT do any possible sneaky duplicitous things, because the benefits to the shareholders outweigh anything else.
I could see this argument 20 years ago. But does it really matter anymore since CCs have become so ubiquitous? I hardly EVER use paper money anymore. The only time I really ever use it is for tolls, and that's only because I'm too lazy to get EZ-Pass. So it seems like a visually-impaired person should be able to get by without handling paper money at all.
Plastic money came to my mind right away too. But if you think about it, paper money could itself be considered a security feature, since it gives the money a limited lifespan. Plastic money lasts a very long time, and therefore cannot be replaced with better bills as easily.
Hey, freedom goes both ways. He's free to say it's all bullshit and he doesn't want anything but for people to fuck off and leave him alone, I'm free to voice my opinion that it's selfish and stupid.
Yes, and I'M free to voice MY opinion that YOUR opinion of him is also selfish and stupid. See how that freedom goes both ways?
I'm flabbergasted when people trot the line "I'm free to say whatever I want" as if that somehow gives credence to their stupid comments. I'm free to say that 2+2=5, but that doesn't mean I'm correct, or that you're somehow infringing on my 'freedom' by publicly disagreeing with me.
There should be something similar to Godwin's Law for people who resort to using the "I'm free to say whatever I want" argument.
Yes!
Endut! Hoch Hech!