The ACLU is hardly a main stream liberal orginisation. It gains lots of liberal support when it fight for civil rights, but it looses lots of liberal support when it fights for free speach. There are even some well known higher ups at the ACLU who are descidedly conservative. I think there is a book writen by one of them.
Anyway, the main stream Liberal philosophy has quite a lot of Marx which is totally orthogonal / irrelevent to the ACLU.
OTOH, many concervative ellected officials depend on the religious right soo much that they are pretty much required to hate the ACLU, so you might as well call the ACLU a Liberal orginisation in many states.
I do not think that the ability to accept conenctions will be the new chokepoint. Yes, there are lots of pople who can not accept connections, but there arre also a great many people who can accept connections, so the connections can always be reversed in practice. Now, people who can not accept connections may not be able to download files from people who can not accept conections, but I do not feal that there is anything wrong with that.. those people accepted an inferior type of service to save money. I expect that cable will not allow servers since the upstream and downstream have vastly diffrent bandwidths (or at least had vastly diffrent bandwidths historically).
BTW> It "should" be impossible for the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, AOL, or anyone to really change the dynamic of the internet so that all individuals recieve service where they can not accept connections. This would represent a fundamental change to the nature of the internet in a VERY bad way and would essentually "instantly" turn it into one big TV network. I do not think anyone would stand for that after they have seen it working the right way.
"Chokepoints" are irrelevent since a reasonable effort to disguise information coupled with good cryptography would make an unfilterable P2P protocoll.
Example: Run Gnutella over SSH or SHTTP connections. No, ISP would dare to block SSH and SHTTP connection and they have no control over the content once the conection start up.
Now, the RIAA can try to track the network to keep people who host file blacklisted, but there are LOTs of people trading music and it would be pretty easy to design a system which accepted some casualties, but prevented the RIAA from tracking down everyone. Unfortunatly, a system like this would not allow anyone to see the whole network, so your searches might find a higher precentage of common garbage like Britney Spears, but it could still be made to work.
Ok, here are two possible senarios: (a) a company you own part of kills some peoplel; (b) your pet dog kills someone; (c) some person antagonizes your dog until it goes and kills someone.
The only real diffrence from a legal point of view is the nature of the life form make the ultimate decission to kill someone, i.e. the dog is not intelegent while the corperate executives are intelegent. Yes, I see that this dose change things, but I do not see how it negates the blame. Yes, I agree that the corperate executives are more responcible then their stock holders, but that still should not absolve the stock holders of financial/civil liability.
Note: It might absolve the stock holders of criminal liability in *most* situations anyway since the standards of proof might require intent (as they should for all crimes invoking jail time). OTOH, If it was common to send people to jail when corperations killed people then there would be a lot more incentive for Mr. Safety at a corperation to record the fact that he told the stock holders or CEO.
Anyway, I'm just saing that the same laws should be applied to all "crimes commited by property" regardless of the property type and number of owners. I feal that (a) == (c) != (b) in the above examples, but I'm not shure that the property owners financial responcibility should be that diffrent in (c) and (b).
Actually, I would expect that the courts would not hold non-voting stock responcible for the ations of the corperations. Clearly, non-voting share holders are partially responcible, but it's pretty dilute by the time you start discussing them. Anyway, my point is that the courts could just access these sorts of things by requiring companies to keep records of voting and have a persons have attached to each vote.
Example: A mutual fund manager who votes the shares of stock for his fund might be held responcible for most of the blame which was assigned to those shares of stock.
Copnversly, we have the following example where non-voting share holders should be heald responcible: A car company starts cutting corners on safety to undercut their compeditors on price, but they lie about the safety issues. The car company starts doing very well and many people buy stock (but do not vote that stock). Clearly, these people are responcible for exploiting consumers and are profiting from a crime, so they should normally be treaded exactly like people who purchas stollen merchandise, i.e. the capital gains on stock they have sold can be taken away. OTOH, What they did was clearly worse the purchasing stolen merchandise since people died as a result. I donno..
You would be responcible if your company was a sole propriatership or partnership (without limited liability). Why should you get to forgo any responcibility for your actions simply because you got diffrent piece of paper? Ultimaly, my proposal is that most companies should be forced to return to the non-limited liability status of smaller companies (or give up pertial control).
Actually, there is one serious moral problem with my proposal: I distinguish between a voting stock holder who opposes the bad direction of the company and a non-voting stock holder. My system would expect the voting stock holder to sell his shares when he did not get his way and "reward" the non-voting stock holder. I do not really see a way to fix this, but it's not a huge problem since we currently treat non-limited liability companies the same way.
You still have not explained how this would "cause the collapse of our economic system." You are not really incuring any more risk by insesting they would would be by driving down the street. Loyds of London was a inshurance like company who was transfering the liability of various high risk corperations. Ordonary investments would not carry nearly as much risk.
Ultimatly, we are faced with two choices: make the stock holders take responcibility or make the governemnt take responcibility and regulate everything (how things currently work). Personally, I feal that a mixture of the two approaches is best, but I like the idea of allowing the mixture to be determined by a laise faire (sp?) approach. That means that the price for being a limited liability company must be high enough that many companies would choose not to become limited liability companies.
The motual fund example dose not really need to be addressed since the answer is obvious: let the courts deal with it. Clearly, if you hold non-voting stock then your "crimes" are much lesser (i.e. misdameaners) or non-existant. It would be the courts decission to adjust things between these two cases based on a variety of circumstances.
Now, there are plenty of examples of the legal system going crazy (like mandatory minimums and the drug war). Yes, investors would be very much at risk if really bad courts were appointed, but I don't see any reason why investors mistakes should be more protected from bad courts then other types of mistakes.
Also, my point still remains that I can create a company to dump poison into someone's back yard and eventually kill them with no liability. If I manage to get other people to invest with me then they should be partially responcilbe too since they are contributing to manslauter. Clearly, they should not suffer a very stiff punnishment (that should be reserved for the board of directors and voting stock), but if you buy a murderer gun then you are partially liabile.
BTW> the courts might choose to let holders of non-voting stock off the hook unless the court suspected that it could prove the stock holder knew something. Remember, that people are supposed to be innocent untill proven guilty in our system, so if the courts required knowelgde for holding of non-voting stock to allow conviction then your mutual funds would never feal a thing. (Voting your shares of stock should always imply knowelgde of the companies actions)
Non-voting stock still has partial control over the company since it effects the stock price of voting stock, but it has *significantly* *less* control then voting stock and the courts would treat it appropreatly. The non-voting stock might only assume 10% of the debt that would have been passed on by the disolution of the company and all criminal charges might be totally dropped or reduced to misdameaners. Clearly, the courts would also try to factor "knowledge" into the equations when they felt it was appropriate.
Remember, a hit and run is still a hit an run even if you did not know that you hit someone, but the court might look at it diffrently and if it's been reduced to some misdameaner comtributory charge anyway then they might drop the charge totally.
You think that people should be able to just throw money arround without regard to it's consequences? If I drop a heavy object from a great hight and it kills someone then I should be held accountable for my poor safty precausions. If I pay some idiot to carry heavy blocks arround when their is a high probability of dropping them and killing people then I should be held accountable. Why dose the fact that I have money and I can find someone dumb enough to do my bidding mean that I can get away with murder or manslauter?
No, stockholders are the owners of their companies and they should ultimatly be held responcible for it's actions. We would have a very diffrent system of investment without limited liability, but our world would not collapse. Instead, the wall streat jounal would offer analysis of the risks involved in purchasing stocks. Yes, there would be "innocent" investors occasionally hurt because they accedentaly invested in a bad company, but there are "innocent" drivers occasionally convicted of manslauter after they "accedentally" ran over and killed someone. They might be a good driver most of the time and have very good intentions, but that one night they made a mistake and the way we prevent those mistakes is by punnishing them harshly.
Also, you are bitching and moaning about "self serving politicos who run around excoriating all these evil companies," but I do not see you running arround compaaining about all the "self serving politicos who run around tring to crusifing people for driving accedents." We have a very good judicial system and those "self serving politicos" should be using the same laws to deal with companies as with individuals.
If I'm a snake oil salesman who sells you poison for "relaxation" then I should go to jail and get sued for wrongful death. The same laws should apply to Philip Morris.
BTW> The real "libhertarian" pssition is that there should never be any limited liability period, but I'm moderat/practical so I propose that a few especially dangerous companies which are especially neccissary should be given limited liability, but I want to see society charge a reasonable price for limited liability and the only reasonable price is sacrificing a significant portion of control.
Yes, there are many way to try to fix these things, but if *someone* was going to jail (or the chair in Texas) for these sorts of crimes then there would be a lot less trouble.
Actually, it's the stock holder who you really want to feal the crack down since they are the only ones who would really change things. Clearly, the executive of a company should be liable for their actions too, but I think that should be considered discting from punnishing the company.
Yes, I agree that a corperation without limited liability would not be very diffrent from a partnership, but it still seams reasonable to force the corperations to (a) "qualify" for having limited liability (i.e. be an essentual company like power) and (b) give up something *verY* importent (like 50% control).
Can partnerships trade stock easily? It would seem reasonable to have some companies with frequently traded stock and without limited liability, i.e. Tobaco companies.
Yes, I think it would be a good idea to decorperate many of our current corperations for various reasons. OTOH, I feal that people should have the right to organize and carry out activities without the fear of the governemnt telling them to go home because they are unfassionable this year. It's importent to remember that this revoking a charter was likely a creation of post-feudal europe, i.e. all the power was centralized arround the king.
Luckily, there is a simple comprmize which allows both the freedom to carry out activities without governement intervention and allows the people to restrict the actions of dangerous companies/.orginisations. Specifically, deny corperations limited liability protections for their stock holders (and fine the shit out of people for doing nasty stuff).
Example: First, Phillip Morris would get sued into bankrupsy and beyond. Second, the debt would get passed onto the people who have held stock in Phillip Morris at the time of the abuses. Third, once a few very rich people lost their houses no one would ever invest in a company they suspected of being dishonest, harming the enviroment, killing people, etc. It would also mean that companies would need to "sell" their "harmless nature" to their investors.
Now, there are essentual companies (like power) which would become impossible under this scheme. The solution would be to allow these essentual companies to give up 50% control to publically ellected officials in exchange for limited liability protection for stock holders. This would be a really good deal for the companies since these ellected officials would typically belong to diffrent parties and thus disagree, but it would still give the public the necissary ammount of control over the company.
Actually, new releases would play fine if you just block the key revokation certificate. They will likely encode the certificate within the header block for the media, but if you can monkey arround with that information enough to copy it to disk then you should be fine.
There is no way to short-circut the "years of hard work" involved in understanding higher-level mathematics. I know it's the holy grail of CS geeks everywhere to streamline the hard work of understanding proofs, but mathematical decompilation is not the answer.
Actually, I had to do exactly that for a friend of mine during freshman year of undergraduate, but he was an *execptionally* wierd case. Plus, he now goes about learning things the "right" way.
Anyway, the reductionist approach is good for cracking one or two hard nuts, like my friend, but it is not mathematics and I would claim that you do not really "understand" anything from the reductionist approach. Reductionism should only be used by expositors when they feal that they need to bully/force someone to open their minds.
Yes, a reductionist dose not normally make a good expositor and it is just the *wrong* way to think about mathematics, but diffrent types of exposition are required for diffrent people. There will be a few non-math people who will understand more via the reductionist approach.
Example: Freshman year of undergraduate, I was forced to explain object oriented programming to a friend by telling him what assembler would be produced by C++. Fortunatly, he eventually "got better" and now understands things.
Now, a copy of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics (highly non-reductionist) with hyperlinks would make a great source of entertainment for math majors.
Actually, my 1GHz Athlon frequently slows to a crawl when I'm doing disk access. I assumed is was something brain dead about the VIA chipset which would be fixed in the next kernel, but I suppose it could be related to the CPU. Any ideas?
Ok, all intelectual property exists to incurage development. I can see that allowing people to remove detailed writen (copyrighted) information from one company and give it to another could discurage initial funding of development, but if a person is just plain useless (i.e. you want to fire them) then they are not likely to really be supper dangerous (i.e. they will be mostly useless to you compeditor dispite having extra information). I say it should be illegal to prevent people from talking about anything. If you piss them off and they sell you out then you were not giving them enough stock options.
Morally, if a company starts pulling this shit with their emploies then the employies should secretly sell out their company. Hell, anonymously communicate all your companies patent plans with one of those places which exploit patent law (ala RAMBUS). Your ass hole boss will just love it when he discovers that all his patents are owned by someone else. Nix one startup which tries to exploit it's employies.
This is not even remotly surprising. It was crystal clear from the beginning of the Napster thing that this was where the RIAA was headed. Napster was a great way to rip off the artists and the RIAA loves ripping off the artists, but they don't like anyone ripping off the artists who is not under their thumb. This how cartels and protection rackets work.
I'm shure they only waited this long since they did not want it to harm their legal sitation with Napster and MP3.com.
Non-sentent life has two values to us: (1) our survival (I say kill the fuckers who are cutting down the rain forest) and (2) research/information (I say kill the fuckers who are cutting down the rain forest or killing off the hump backs).
Clearly, only reason (2) is relevent to the studdy of life on another planet. We should be willing to take a few risks for the purpose of studing this life. Plus, we are likely to just be studing fossils since all the life there could be dead by now anyway. Regardless, I'm shure that NASA will take all reasonable efforts to limit contamination.
"Registering" TLDs will not help since companies will still want to control anything including their name. Actually, it would just add one more place where the current fight can continue.
We need a system where the companies can not hope to control their name for all TLDs. Specifically, we need an "anarchy" based system for TLDs where anyone can create their own TLD "server," but there will be no "registration."
Example: I could create my own.com but people are unlikely to use it since they will expect the current.com. Now, if I provided all the current.com sites, but made microshit.com point to the propper site (i.e. not a site owned my microsoft) then I would probable get many "subscribers."
This will kinda happen with alternative root servers, but we need a bigger push to make these amusing and popular.
Law enforcment is not likely to get the old style phone network or the networks which connect to them (cell) to use any real encryption. We need to find a way to circumvent the control that law enforcment has over the production of phones, i.e. we need user control over phones (ala open source). I see two current ways to do this:
1) We have only source phone software for PC-toPC phones, but we need to make shure that it "wins" the PC-to-PC phone market.
2) We need to see an "all software" PDA/phone which adds support for faxes and voice recording/play back by user replacable software software (i.e. a win modem and sound card). This would make it easy to add the PGP phone protocoll to the PDA/phone. Unfortunatly, the only thing that I think we can do to really help this in the short term would be to make shure that Linux maintains support with the popular win modem chipsets and maybe write PGP/phone software for these chipsets.
Yes, it strikes me that no one has ever tried a 50% socialism type solution. This is a really serious tragedy since people have tried the moderate extremes (capitalism and communism). Instead, it seems like all attempts at mixing socialism and capitalism are designed from one of the following points of view:
a) A small group of people design the system of private control and government regulation to make a themselves very powerful (examples: Fashism and much current U.S. regulation)
b) Communists claim control of a specific industry like health care and replace the previous problems with capitalism with new communist problems.
Clearly, these are really dumb ways to run a country/economy. The simple solution is to just give the pulic partial control over corperations which influence their lives. Libertarian socialism have the advnatage of being more "ethical" since the corperations are voluntarily giving up control, but it would be nice to see any simillar expiriment.
Centralized control causes coruption, inefficency, stupidity, etc. regardless of political philiosophy (capitalism or communism), but I also agree that companies should not have only their share holders interests at stake (at least when they are companies which produce externalities).
Personally, I have my own political philosophy: Libertarian Socialism. The key idea is to remove all limits on liability, i.e. if you owned stock in a company 50 years ago when they did something bad then you _personally_ can be sued. The eviroment and workers would be protected with big ass civil law suit and/or fines after the fact, i.e. if your company causes the extinction of a spieces of butterfly then society cgarges your company at least one billion dollars (more for scientific and ecological importance) because we have lost a valuble information & ecological resource. If the company is only worth 1 million dollars then this debt will be passed on to the stock holders (who may lose their houses). Anyway, the moral of the story is "do not invest in a company which is likely to do risky things."
Now, this will make many buisnesses impossible (like manufactoring, mining, and power plant), so society will offer these buisnesses the limited liability in exchange for about 50% public control of the company. It's just a fair trade betyween society and the stock holders, 50% control for liability protection. Clearly, these company can still be sued or fined, but the stock holders will no longer be liabile for more then their ownership.
You did not know that the corperations are turnning us into a pseudo-communist state. The corperations will be the "party" and they will own everything (unlike) the USSR where the government owned eveything.
It was _decentralized_ property ownership that made this country great, not centralized corperations. Centralized capitalism has the exact same problems as communism. Hell, just look at all the corperate welfare we have today. That's the great sucking sounds of centralization which killed the USSR.
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The ACLU is hardly a main stream liberal orginisation. It gains lots of liberal support when it fight for civil rights, but it looses lots of liberal support when it fights for free speach. There are even some well known higher ups at the ACLU who are descidedly conservative. I think there is a book writen by one of them.
Anyway, the main stream Liberal philosophy has quite a lot of Marx which is totally orthogonal / irrelevent to the ACLU.
OTOH, many concervative ellected officials depend on the religious right soo much that they are pretty much required to hate the ACLU, so you might as well call the ACLU a Liberal orginisation in many states.
I do not think that the ability to accept conenctions will be the new chokepoint. Yes, there are lots of pople who can not accept connections, but there arre also a great many people who can accept connections, so the connections can always be reversed in practice. Now, people who can not accept connections may not be able to download files from people who can not accept conections, but I do not feal that there is anything wrong with that.. those people accepted an inferior type of service to save money. I expect that cable will not allow servers since the upstream and downstream have vastly diffrent bandwidths (or at least had vastly diffrent bandwidths historically).
BTW> It "should" be impossible for the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, AOL, or anyone to really change the dynamic of the internet so that all individuals recieve service where they can not accept connections. This would represent a fundamental change to the nature of the internet in a VERY bad way and would essentually "instantly" turn it into one big TV network. I do not think anyone would stand for that after they have seen it working the right way.
"Chokepoints" are irrelevent since a reasonable effort to disguise information coupled with good cryptography would make an unfilterable P2P protocoll.
Example: Run Gnutella over SSH or SHTTP connections. No, ISP would dare to block SSH and SHTTP connection and they have no control over the content once the conection start up.
Now, the RIAA can try to track the network to keep people who host file blacklisted, but there are LOTs of people trading music and it would be pretty easy to design a system which accepted some casualties, but prevented the RIAA from tracking down everyone. Unfortunatly, a system like this would not allow anyone to see the whole network, so your searches might find a higher precentage of common garbage like Britney Spears, but it could still be made to work.
Ok, here are two possible senarios: (a) a company you own part of kills some peoplel; (b) your pet dog kills someone; (c) some person antagonizes your dog until it goes and kills someone.
The only real diffrence from a legal point of view is the nature of the life form make the ultimate decission to kill someone, i.e. the dog is not intelegent while the corperate executives are intelegent. Yes, I see that this dose change things, but I do not see how it negates the blame. Yes, I agree that the corperate executives are more responcible then their stock holders, but that still should not absolve the stock holders of financial/civil liability.
Note: It might absolve the stock holders of criminal liability in *most* situations anyway since the standards of proof might require intent (as they should for all crimes invoking jail time). OTOH, If it was common to send people to jail when corperations killed people then there would be a lot more incentive for Mr. Safety at a corperation to record the fact that he told the stock holders or CEO.
Anyway, I'm just saing that the same laws should be applied to all "crimes commited by property" regardless of the property type and number of owners. I feal that (a) == (c) != (b) in the above examples, but I'm not shure that the property owners financial responcibility should be that diffrent in (c) and (b).
Actually, I would expect that the courts would not hold non-voting stock responcible for the ations of the corperations. Clearly, non-voting share holders are partially responcible, but it's pretty dilute by the time you start discussing them. Anyway, my point is that the courts could just access these sorts of things by requiring companies to keep records of voting and have a persons have attached to each vote.
Example: A mutual fund manager who votes the shares of stock for his fund might be held responcible for most of the blame which was assigned to those shares of stock.
Copnversly, we have the following example where non-voting share holders should be heald responcible: A car company starts cutting corners on safety to undercut their compeditors on price, but they lie about the safety issues. The car company starts doing very well and many people buy stock (but do not vote that stock). Clearly, these people are responcible for exploiting consumers and are profiting from a crime, so they should normally be treaded exactly like people who purchas stollen merchandise, i.e. the capital gains on stock they have sold can be taken away. OTOH, What they did was clearly worse the purchasing stolen merchandise since people died as a result. I donno..
You would be responcible if your company was a sole propriatership or partnership (without limited liability). Why should you get to forgo any responcibility for your actions simply because you got diffrent piece of paper? Ultimaly, my proposal is that most companies should be forced to return to the non-limited liability status of smaller companies (or give up pertial control).
Actually, there is one serious moral problem with my proposal: I distinguish between a voting stock holder who opposes the bad direction of the company and a non-voting stock holder. My system would expect the voting stock holder to sell his shares when he did not get his way and "reward" the non-voting stock holder. I do not really see a way to fix this, but it's not a huge problem since we currently treat non-limited liability companies the same way.
You still have not explained how this would "cause the collapse of our economic system." You are not really incuring any more risk by insesting they would would be by driving down the street. Loyds of London was a inshurance like company who was transfering the liability of various high risk corperations. Ordonary investments would not carry nearly as much risk.
Ultimatly, we are faced with two choices: make the stock holders take responcibility or make the governemnt take responcibility and regulate everything (how things currently work). Personally, I feal that a mixture of the two approaches is best, but I like the idea of allowing the mixture to be determined by a laise faire (sp?) approach. That means that the price for being a limited liability company must be high enough that many companies would choose not to become limited liability companies.
The motual fund example dose not really need to be addressed since the answer is obvious: let the courts deal with it. Clearly, if you hold non-voting stock then your "crimes" are much lesser (i.e. misdameaners) or non-existant. It would be the courts decission to adjust things between these two cases based on a variety of circumstances.
Now, there are plenty of examples of the legal system going crazy (like mandatory minimums and the drug war). Yes, investors would be very much at risk if really bad courts were appointed, but I don't see any reason why investors mistakes should be more protected from bad courts then other types of mistakes.
Also, my point still remains that I can create a company to dump poison into someone's back yard and eventually kill them with no liability. If I manage to get other people to invest with me then they should be partially responcilbe too since they are contributing to manslauter. Clearly, they should not suffer a very stiff punnishment (that should be reserved for the board of directors and voting stock), but if you buy a murderer gun then you are partially liabile.
BTW> the courts might choose to let holders of non-voting stock off the hook unless the court suspected that it could prove the stock holder knew something. Remember, that people are supposed to be innocent untill proven guilty in our system, so if the courts required knowelgde for holding of non-voting stock to allow conviction then your mutual funds would never feal a thing. (Voting your shares of stock should always imply knowelgde of the companies actions)
Non-voting stock still has partial control over the company since it effects the stock price of voting stock, but it has *significantly* *less* control then voting stock and the courts would treat it appropreatly. The non-voting stock might only assume 10% of the debt that would have been passed on by the disolution of the company and all criminal charges might be totally dropped or reduced to misdameaners. Clearly, the courts would also try to factor "knowledge" into the equations when they felt it was appropriate.
Remember, a hit and run is still a hit an run even if you did not know that you hit someone, but the court might look at it diffrently and if it's been reduced to some misdameaner comtributory charge anyway then they might drop the charge totally.
You think that people should be able to just throw money arround without regard to it's consequences? If I drop a heavy object from a great hight and it kills someone then I should be held accountable for my poor safty precausions. If I pay some idiot to carry heavy blocks arround when their is a high probability of dropping them and killing people then I should be held accountable. Why dose the fact that I have money and I can find someone dumb enough to do my bidding mean that I can get away with murder or manslauter?
No, stockholders are the owners of their companies and they should ultimatly be held responcible for it's actions. We would have a very diffrent system of investment without limited liability, but our world would not collapse. Instead, the wall streat jounal would offer analysis of the risks involved in purchasing stocks. Yes, there would be "innocent" investors occasionally hurt because they accedentaly invested in a bad company, but there are "innocent" drivers occasionally convicted of manslauter after they "accedentally" ran over and killed someone. They might be a good driver most of the time and have very good intentions, but that one night they made a mistake and the way we prevent those mistakes is by punnishing them harshly.
Also, you are bitching and moaning about "self serving politicos who run around excoriating all these evil companies," but I do not see you running arround compaaining about all the "self serving politicos who run around tring to crusifing people for driving accedents." We have a very good judicial system and those "self serving politicos" should be using the same laws to deal with companies as with individuals.
If I'm a snake oil salesman who sells you poison for "relaxation" then I should go to jail and get sued for wrongful death. The same laws should apply to Philip Morris.
BTW> The real "libhertarian" pssition is that there should never be any limited liability period, but I'm moderat/practical so I propose that a few especially dangerous companies which are especially neccissary should be given limited liability, but I want to see society charge a reasonable price for limited liability and the only reasonable price is sacrificing a significant portion of control.
Yes, there are many way to try to fix these things, but if *someone* was going to jail (or the chair in Texas) for these sorts of crimes then there would be a lot less trouble.
Actually, it's the stock holder who you really want to feal the crack down since they are the only ones who would really change things. Clearly, the executive of a company should be liable for their actions too, but I think that should be considered discting from punnishing the company.
Yes, I agree that a corperation without limited liability would not be very diffrent from a partnership, but it still seams reasonable to force the corperations to (a) "qualify" for having limited liability (i.e. be an essentual company like power) and (b) give up something *verY* importent (like 50% control).
Can partnerships trade stock easily? It would seem reasonable to have some companies with frequently traded stock and without limited liability, i.e. Tobaco companies.
Yes, I think it would be a good idea to decorperate many of our current corperations for various reasons. OTOH, I feal that people should have the right to organize and carry out activities without the fear of the governemnt telling them to go home because they are unfassionable this year. It's importent to remember that this revoking a charter was likely a creation of post-feudal europe, i.e. all the power was centralized arround the king.
Luckily, there is a simple comprmize which allows both the freedom to carry out activities without governement intervention and allows the people to restrict the actions of dangerous companies/.orginisations. Specifically, deny corperations limited liability protections for their stock holders (and fine the shit out of people for doing nasty stuff).
Example: First, Phillip Morris would get sued into bankrupsy and beyond. Second, the debt would get passed onto the people who have held stock in Phillip Morris at the time of the abuses. Third, once a few very rich people lost their houses no one would ever invest in a company they suspected of being dishonest, harming the enviroment, killing people, etc. It would also mean that companies would need to "sell" their "harmless nature" to their investors.
Now, there are essentual companies (like power) which would become impossible under this scheme. The solution would be to allow these essentual companies to give up 50% control to publically ellected officials in exchange for limited liability protection for stock holders. This would be a really good deal for the companies since these ellected officials would typically belong to diffrent parties and thus disagree, but it would still give the public the necissary ammount of control over the company.
(BTW nice quote)
Actually, new releases would play fine if you just block the key revokation certificate. They will likely encode the certificate within the header block for the media, but if you can monkey arround with that information enough to copy it to disk then you should be fine.
There is no way to short-circut the "years of hard work" involved in understanding higher-level mathematics. I know it's the holy grail of CS geeks everywhere to streamline the hard work of understanding proofs, but mathematical decompilation is not the answer.
Actually, I had to do exactly that for a friend of mine during freshman year of undergraduate, but he was an *execptionally* wierd case. Plus, he now goes about learning things the "right" way.
Anyway, the reductionist approach is good for cracking one or two hard nuts, like my friend, but it is not mathematics and I would claim that you do not really "understand" anything from the reductionist approach. Reductionism should only be used by expositors when they feal that they need to bully/force someone to open their minds.
Yes, a reductionist dose not normally make a good expositor and it is just the *wrong* way to think about mathematics, but diffrent types of exposition are required for diffrent people. There will be a few non-math people who will understand more via the reductionist approach.
Example: Freshman year of undergraduate, I was forced to explain object oriented programming to a friend by telling him what assembler would be produced by C++. Fortunatly, he eventually "got better" and now understands things.
Now, a copy of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics (highly non-reductionist) with hyperlinks would make a great source of entertainment for math majors.
Actually, my 1GHz Athlon frequently slows to a crawl when I'm doing disk access. I assumed is was something brain dead about the VIA chipset which would be fixed in the next kernel, but I suppose it could be related to the CPU. Any ideas?
Jeff
Ok, all intelectual property exists to incurage development. I can see that allowing people to remove detailed writen (copyrighted) information from one company and give it to another could discurage initial funding of development, but if a person is just plain useless (i.e. you want to fire them) then they are not likely to really be supper dangerous (i.e. they will be mostly useless to you compeditor dispite having extra information). I say it should be illegal to prevent people from talking about anything. If you piss them off and they sell you out then you were not giving them enough stock options.
Morally, if a company starts pulling this shit with their emploies then the employies should secretly sell out their company. Hell, anonymously communicate all your companies patent plans with one of those places which exploit patent law (ala RAMBUS). Your ass hole boss will just love it when he discovers that all his patents are owned by someone else. Nix one startup which tries to exploit it's employies.
This is not even remotly surprising. It was crystal clear from the beginning of the Napster thing that this was where the RIAA was headed. Napster was a great way to rip off the artists and the RIAA loves ripping off the artists, but they don't like anyone ripping off the artists who is not under their thumb. This how cartels and protection rackets work.
I'm shure they only waited this long since they did not want it to harm their legal sitation with Napster and MP3.com.
Non-sentent life has two values to us: (1) our survival (I say kill the fuckers who are cutting down the rain forest) and (2) research/information (I say kill the fuckers who are cutting down the rain forest or killing off the hump backs).
Clearly, only reason (2) is relevent to the studdy of life on another planet. We should be willing to take a few risks for the purpose of studing this life. Plus, we are likely to just be studing fossils since all the life there could be dead by now anyway. Regardless, I'm shure that NASA will take all reasonable efforts to limit contamination.
"Registering" TLDs will not help since companies will still want to control anything including their name. Actually, it would just add one more place where the current fight can continue.
.com but people are unlikely to use it since they will expect the current .com. Now, if I provided all the current .com sites, but made microshit.com point to the propper site (i.e. not a site owned my microsoft) then I would probable get many "subscribers."
We need a system where the companies can not hope to control their name for all TLDs. Specifically, we need an "anarchy" based system for TLDs where anyone can create their own TLD "server," but there will be no "registration."
Example: I could create my own
This will kinda happen with alternative root servers, but we need a bigger push to make these amusing and popular.
Law enforcment is not likely to get the old style phone network or the networks which connect to them (cell) to use any real encryption. We need to find a way to circumvent the control that law enforcment has over the production of phones, i.e. we need user control over phones (ala open source). I see two current ways to do this:
1) We have only source phone software for PC-toPC phones, but we need to make shure that it "wins" the PC-to-PC phone market.
2) We need to see an "all software" PDA/phone which adds support for faxes and voice recording/play back by user replacable software software (i.e. a win modem and sound card). This would make it easy to add the PGP phone protocoll to the PDA/phone. Unfortunatly, the only thing that I think we can do to really help this in the short term would be to make shure that Linux maintains support with the popular win modem chipsets and maybe write PGP/phone software for these chipsets.
Yes, it strikes me that no one has ever tried a 50% socialism type solution. This is a really serious tragedy since people have tried the moderate extremes (capitalism and communism). Instead, it seems like all attempts at mixing socialism and capitalism are designed from one of the following points of view:
a) A small group of people design the system of private control and government regulation to make a themselves very powerful (examples: Fashism and much current U.S. regulation)
b) Communists claim control of a specific industry like health care and replace the previous problems with capitalism with new communist problems.
Clearly, these are really dumb ways to run a country/economy. The simple solution is to just give the pulic partial control over corperations which influence their lives. Libertarian socialism have the advnatage of being more "ethical" since the corperations are voluntarily giving up control, but it would be nice to see any simillar expiriment.
Centralized control causes coruption, inefficency, stupidity, etc. regardless of political philiosophy (capitalism or communism), but I also agree that companies should not have only their share holders interests at stake (at least when they are companies which produce externalities).
Personally, I have my own political philosophy: Libertarian Socialism. The key idea is to remove all limits on liability, i.e. if you owned stock in a company 50 years ago when they did something bad then you _personally_ can be sued. The eviroment and workers would be protected with big ass civil law suit and/or fines after the fact, i.e. if your company causes the extinction of a spieces of butterfly then society cgarges your company at least one billion dollars (more for scientific and ecological importance) because we have lost a valuble information & ecological resource. If the company is only worth 1 million dollars then this debt will be passed on to the stock holders (who may lose their houses). Anyway, the moral of the story is "do not invest in a company which is likely to do risky things."
Now, this will make many buisnesses impossible (like manufactoring, mining, and power plant), so society will offer these buisnesses the limited liability in exchange for about 50% public control of the company. It's just a fair trade betyween society and the stock holders, 50% control for liability protection. Clearly, these company can still be sued or fined, but the stock holders will no longer be liabile for more then their ownership.
You did not know that the corperations are turnning us into a pseudo-communist state. The corperations will be the "party" and they will own everything (unlike) the USSR where the government owned eveything.
It was _decentralized_ property ownership that made this country great, not centralized corperations. Centralized capitalism has the exact same problems as communism. Hell, just look at all the corperate welfare we have today. That's the great sucking sounds of centralization which killed the USSR.