All so-called corporate speech is actually the speech of individual people
That's not true in any useful sense.
When you have four scriptwriters, another two editors, and three layers of management that need to review and approve the script (and send back various changes), it's not the speech of any individual person anymore. It's created by a combination of people, no single one of whom necessarily agrees completely with the entire message. It's created to support the interests of the corporation, which may not specifically or directly coincide with the interests of any of the individual people who make it up.
What you say would only be meaningfully true if the CEO of the company got up in front of the camera and personally gave the speech delivering the message he wants his company to send, taking full personal responsibility for it.
That last part, by the way, is the most important one, I believe. As it stands, when a corporation delivers a press release, or makes a statement through a spokesperson, or what have you, the corporation itself is where the responsibility for the statement lies. The individual people involved are completely insulated from any ill effects by the corporate veil.
I understand the line needs to be defined and corporations will circumvent the issue by paying people to make their speech for them
You seem not to realize that corporations don't actually have concrete existence and that they are merely a legal fiction, and that every action attributed to a "corporation" is actually the action of one or more individual natural persons, right?
Because when you realize this, your whole argument about corporations circumventing the issue by paying people to make speech for them is nonsensical -- all speech attributed to corporations is actually made by natural persons. Because there is no one else to make it.
This would be true if "speech" meant simply "people speaking."
It doesn't. "Speech" includes "producing advertisements to say what the collective of people running the corporation agree they want said." And that is protected. (And does not, I believe, fall under the OP's description of "paying people to say stuff for them," because in this situation, the fact that a corporation is the one putting the words in their mouths is clear and open.)
No matter how violent a video game gets, it can't hurt a human. And it's not that difficult to broadcast people playing video games—it happens all the time already. (Especially in Korea!) Let people watch that, instead.
Heck, you could just replace American football games with broadcasts of people playing American football video games, with some professional commentators. I bet you plenty of people would never notice the difference. (Especially if the kind of money currently being spent on sports were to be spent on improving the quality and verisimilitude of the games being used as e-sports!)
The fact that a sport that is basically glorified violence causes mental problems in the participants over the course of time does not come as a huge surprise to me.
In fact, I think that when the country finally wakes up and realizes that the right thing to do is to abandon violent sports like American football, rugby, and hockey (at least, hockey as it is commonly played today) for good, it will be a huge net positive for America and, indeed, for the world.
Let's hope that this will draw more attention to the issue of caps in general, and biased caps in particular, as being detrimental to things that ordinary people want to use, and big companies want to sell.
"Net Neutrality" is a confusing thing to most people, but "Sony won't sell you videos on demand because of Comcast's biased data caps" is much easier. I think even Congresscritters might be able to understand that one.
From where I sit, this has been one of the greatest disappointments even staunch supporters like me have with Obama: his administration's continued support for the content industry at the expense of people in America and around the world.
Rebuttals are known to not work against believers. Why are you bringing up a proposal for which we have ample evidence of failure?
That's pretty arrogant. Have you thought that maybe it's because you are consistently on the wrong side of the argument? Just a thought.
Right, because he totally just said, "I know rebuttals don't work, because they've never worked for me," and not, "we have [scientific] evidence that rebuttals will not convince believers."
We're too scared to say "No." to a barely competent security guard when he demands to manhandle a 4 year old. What makes you think we'll actually try and stop a plane hijacking? I can't help but think that this is armchair quarterbacking at its finest, as much as I hate to say it.
Except that we saw this happen with Flight 93 on 9-11-2001. The people on that plane heard what had happened in New York and DC, and even though the plane had (IIRC) already been taken over by the hijackers, they got together and forced it to crash.
Basically, the point is that since the Sept. 11 attacks, we know that the consequences of being hijacked are "everybody on the plane dies, and maybe a few thousand people outside the plane, too". So...that really changes the calculation a bit.
Best I've seen so far has been Apple's iChat. It lets you record video chats natively and without hassle, with both parties having to agree.
Works with AIM, Jabber/Google Talk, and (in the Messages beta) iMessage.
Obviously the main flaw is that it doesn't work if the person on the other end doesn't have a Mac. If they do, though, I don't see any reason not to use it. There are even scripts you can use to set it to automatically ask to record each call when it starts.
Plus I very much love that I can call my travel agency, be greeted by name, and tell them that I'm thinking about my next holiday, give them a few items (beach or no, culture or relaxation, which continent, etc.) and then drop by a day or two later and they have a couple recommendations for me.
That's...not what travel agents are like around here.
They're a bunch of bored-looking middle-aged ladies with spray tans and too much makeup and hair dye, who can barely be bothered to stop playing solitaire and/or talking on the phone to their friends to pay attention to you long enough to show you the fliers they have that cruise ship companies have given them. Getting them to actually do a search for something is only possible with persistence and a willingness to sit through eye-rolling and a great deal of one-fingered typing.
If the travel agencies in this area were anything like the one you described, I would gladly go talk to them any time I was thinking about a vacation. As it is, I'd rather go to the dentist.
It'll be interesting to see the first "Wall" lawsuit from the people who brought you The Wall (Pink Floyd), or perhaps going back even farther, the Great Wall. China vs. Facebook. There's an interesting court battle. "Poke"? C'mon. I was using the "POKE" Applesoft BASIC command over 25 years ago.
Irrelevant, irrelevant, and more irrelevant.
They are not asserting a patent. They are asserting a trademark. Prior art has nothing whatsoever to do with trademarks.
You can claim that a mark is not sufficiently distinctive, or that it infringes an actual trademark that existed before, but you can't invalidate it just because people were using a word that it contains before.
I'm not even close to a lawyer, and I can at least keep that much straight...
Well, I'm afraid I don't have any citable source to show you; this is based on the observations and experience of my wife during the 6 years in which she flew to China 5 times/year to visit the factory the company she worked for maintained there.
Similarly, though, I have not heard of loads of villages being displaced/destroyed by big business in China. So I guess we're even:-)
For instance, underage workers is a serious concern. He represented that he saw underage workers where the correction says that underage workers were rare. If you are interested in this topic, his report would lead you to the false conclusion that underage workers were a problem when they are not. The reality would suggest that some underage workers do slip through the system and Foxconn needs to strengthen their checks rather than an overhaul.
It's important to realize what "underage workers" means, too. It's not children of 6-8 years old being forced to work in abominable conditions. 99% of the time, "underage workers" in China are teenagers who have used their older siblings' IDs to get jobs, so that they can make some more money for themselves or their families.
Certainly it's something that Foxconn and other companies need to be alert for. But it's a far cry from the deliberate abuse that's frequently implied by the phrase "child labour."
I think people miss that point... the foxconn employees work for foxconn, not apple. Apple pays foxconn what foxconn negotiated.
Foxconn could turn around and ask for more when the contract is up so that it could pay it's workers more, but then some other company would likely outbid them.
Actually, I'm not sure about that. There have been multiple articles pointing out that Foxconn is basically the place that can do what Apple needs at the moment. None of the other companies in China have the kind of muscle behind them to meet Apple's (rather demanding) standards.
Not to say that could never change, but for now, it sounds like Foxconn and Apple have each other right where they want each other.
sustenance living is impossible when a big factory comes to town and shits on your farmland and pollutes your water supply, as is happening all over china. so unregulated industry destroys the way of life for millions of people, and they have no choice but to go work in that factory.
That...actually doesn't happen very much. The factories tend to be concentrated in areas like Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Dongguan. Sure, there were farms in some of these areas years back, but by and large, they've been urban for a while. And there's a lot of China that's still rural, where the factories don't even want to go. There's just no profit in it.
So, yeah, if you happen to be one of the few hundred—or even few thousand—farmers whose land was taken over or polluted by the factories, then that sucks, and I doubt they received much compensation, because, y'know, mostly-totalitarian regime and all that. But don't forget that that's only 0.00001%-0.0001% of the population. It's hardly a careful, concerted effort to drive people away from subsistence agriculture towards factory life.
And you know what? They don't need any such effort, because the Chinese people are flocking to factory life as fast as they can possibly manage. Subsistence agriculture sucks.
Don't tell me you don't have something like that in your country. That would be insane.
If we do (in the USA), I've never heard of it, and wouldn't know where to look for it. And I'm pretty well-educated and well-informed. Heck, I worked in the insurance industry for 6 years (albeit the odd corner of it that is workers' compensation).
The "standard" kinds of insurance pretty much every American knows they should get is basically homeowners', automobile, health (+dental, vision), and life. Homeowners' should include flood, earthquake, and tornado for people in the relevant parts of the country.
Other than that, it's (seen as) either for businesses, or weird stuff that only paranoid nutcases would buy.
If you can show that everything that has ever happened inside the aquarium would have happened exactly like it did without anyone from the outside interfering, you have proved that there was no outside effect.
(Disclaimer: Not actually seeking to argue against your broader thesis, just noticed a possible hole in this piece.)
To some extent, yes, we can measure everything. But we have to be looking.
If a hypothetical God were to influence the world in manners both subtle and far-reaching (because the world is a chaotic system, and tiny inputs can, in the right places and times, have huge effects), how would we be able to prove that it was, in fact, the doing of God?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car takes a wrong turn down a side street, and World War I breaks out. The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts accepts a young aspiring artist named Adolf Hitler, and he never goes on to start the Third Reich.
Unless we can be observing every event—which means, every aspect of every cubic millimeter of the earth, inside and out, including things we currently have no good way to measure, and to a wide radius around it, for events that are initiated in space—we cannot possibly carry out such proof that no outside force acts upon events here.
That leaves only two moral choices: either Chinese factories must raise their standards to American standards ASAP, or else nearly every single company that sells a product in America needs to be penalized (in America) for not following American labor laws while producing nominally American products.
Fixed that for you.
I mean, seriously, what is with the focus on Apple, when every single reputable report shows that Apple is among the very best when it comes to how they get people treated at the factories producing their stuff?
And honestly, I wouldn't mind too much (though admittedly I don't fully grasp the economics and practicalities of it) if penalties of this sort were applied fairly and reasonably to American companies who have their products produced in factories that adhere to standards lower than what would be legal in America. That would lead pretty quickly to improvement of conditions in China, to the extent that such is possible there.
There is one question that I have in my mind after reading this: Isn't the real problem that these games are back in the store after a week? I mean, what kind of games are that? From the games that I bought, maybe one or two would've suffered that fate, simply because they were utterly horrible.
I think that it's less a reflection on the games themselves, as on the attitudes of the gamers. They expect to buy the game, beat it in a week, and bring it back to get a little money back.
The only games that are immune to this are the type that you can't just "beat"—mostly the primarily-online ones.
I find myself a bit boggled by the idea myself, but then, a big part of that is that I don't have 80+ hours over the course of a week to dedicate solely to playing a single video game.
(And yes, this marks me as hopelessly undereducated, and obviously a fool who doesn't know anything about Real Programming. So sue me. Just tell us what they are, too, please?)
How hard is it to not put your phone into the same pocket as your keys or spare change?
Well, in general, I agree with your post, but for this, I have to say: if I didn't put my phone in the pocket with my keys or the pocket with my spare change, it would have to go into one of the pockets I sit on.
I don't think that's really all that good for it, either.
However, I have an Otterbox Defender case for mine, since I have known for years that I tend to be hard on my devices, not through conscious uncaring, but through clumsiness and carelessness.
"It's the first article in the constitution. 'Access to information shall not be abridged.'" - Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
Of course, it would have to be supported by language indicating that this means all people must have access without charge or limit (beyond reasonable "you can't surf porn at the internet cafe 24/7" measures) to the means of accessing said information. But Cerf is right, the point shouldn't be Internet access; it should be access to information. The Internet is just our current incarnation of that access, and someday, it will be supplanted by a better or different technology. (Or it will be destroyed in the human-initiated apocalypse. One way or the other.)
Slashdot Mirror
All so-called corporate speech is actually the speech of individual people
That's not true in any useful sense.
When you have four scriptwriters, another two editors, and three layers of management that need to review and approve the script (and send back various changes), it's not the speech of any individual person anymore. It's created by a combination of people, no single one of whom necessarily agrees completely with the entire message. It's created to support the interests of the corporation, which may not specifically or directly coincide with the interests of any of the individual people who make it up.
What you say would only be meaningfully true if the CEO of the company got up in front of the camera and personally gave the speech delivering the message he wants his company to send, taking full personal responsibility for it.
That last part, by the way, is the most important one, I believe. As it stands, when a corporation delivers a press release, or makes a statement through a spokesperson, or what have you, the corporation itself is where the responsibility for the statement lies. The individual people involved are completely insulated from any ill effects by the corporate veil.
Dan Aris
You seem not to realize that corporations don't actually have concrete existence and that they are merely a legal fiction, and that every action attributed to a "corporation" is actually the action of one or more individual natural persons, right?
Because when you realize this, your whole argument about corporations circumventing the issue by paying people to make speech for them is nonsensical -- all speech attributed to corporations is actually made by natural persons. Because there is no one else to make it.
This would be true if "speech" meant simply "people speaking."
It doesn't. "Speech" includes "producing advertisements to say what the collective of people running the corporation agree they want said." And that is protected. (And does not, I believe, fall under the OP's description of "paying people to say stuff for them," because in this situation, the fact that a corporation is the one putting the words in their mouths is clear and open.)
Dan Aris
Mimmoth on a stick, anyone?
Dan Aris
How about virtually?
No matter how violent a video game gets, it can't hurt a human. And it's not that difficult to broadcast people playing video games—it happens all the time already. (Especially in Korea!) Let people watch that, instead.
Heck, you could just replace American football games with broadcasts of people playing American football video games, with some professional commentators. I bet you plenty of people would never notice the difference. (Especially if the kind of money currently being spent on sports were to be spent on improving the quality and verisimilitude of the games being used as e-sports!)
Dan Aris
The fact that a sport that is basically glorified violence causes mental problems in the participants over the course of time does not come as a huge surprise to me.
In fact, I think that when the country finally wakes up and realizes that the right thing to do is to abandon violent sports like American football, rugby, and hockey (at least, hockey as it is commonly played today) for good, it will be a huge net positive for America and, indeed, for the world.
Dan Aris
Let's hope that this will draw more attention to the issue of caps in general, and biased caps in particular, as being detrimental to things that ordinary people want to use, and big companies want to sell.
"Net Neutrality" is a confusing thing to most people, but "Sony won't sell you videos on demand because of Comcast's biased data caps" is much easier. I think even Congresscritters might be able to understand that one.
Dan Aris
From where I sit, this has been one of the greatest disappointments even staunch supporters like me have with Obama: his administration's continued support for the content industry at the expense of people in America and around the world.
Dan Aris
Rebuttals are known to not work against believers. Why are you bringing up a proposal for which we have ample evidence of failure?
That's pretty arrogant. Have you thought that maybe it's because you are consistently on the wrong side of the argument? Just a thought.
Right, because he totally just said, "I know rebuttals don't work, because they've never worked for me," and not, "we have [scientific] evidence that rebuttals will not convince believers."
Dan Aris
We're too scared to say "No." to a barely competent security guard when he demands to manhandle a 4 year old. What makes you think we'll actually try and stop a plane hijacking? I can't help but think that this is armchair quarterbacking at its finest, as much as I hate to say it.
Except that we saw this happen with Flight 93 on 9-11-2001. The people on that plane heard what had happened in New York and DC, and even though the plane had (IIRC) already been taken over by the hijackers, they got together and forced it to crash.
Basically, the point is that since the Sept. 11 attacks, we know that the consequences of being hijacked are "everybody on the plane dies, and maybe a few thousand people outside the plane, too". So...that really changes the calculation a bit.
Dan Aris
How many 2nd level names will we see within .citibank, .kfc and .disney?
Actually, given the number of different Disney domains and subdomains I already get technically-not-spam from, there might be quite a few there.
Dan Aris
Best I've seen so far has been Apple's iChat. It lets you record video chats natively and without hassle, with both parties having to agree.
Works with AIM, Jabber/Google Talk, and (in the Messages beta) iMessage.
Obviously the main flaw is that it doesn't work if the person on the other end doesn't have a Mac. If they do, though, I don't see any reason not to use it. There are even scripts you can use to set it to automatically ask to record each call when it starts.
Dan Aris
Plus I very much love that I can call my travel agency, be greeted by name, and tell them that I'm thinking about my next holiday, give them a few items (beach or no, culture or relaxation, which continent, etc.) and then drop by a day or two later and they have a couple recommendations for me.
That's...not what travel agents are like around here.
They're a bunch of bored-looking middle-aged ladies with spray tans and too much makeup and hair dye, who can barely be bothered to stop playing solitaire and/or talking on the phone to their friends to pay attention to you long enough to show you the fliers they have that cruise ship companies have given them. Getting them to actually do a search for something is only possible with persistence and a willingness to sit through eye-rolling and a great deal of one-fingered typing.
If the travel agencies in this area were anything like the one you described, I would gladly go talk to them any time I was thinking about a vacation. As it is, I'd rather go to the dentist.
Dan Aris
It'll be interesting to see the first "Wall" lawsuit from the people who brought you The Wall (Pink Floyd), or perhaps going back even farther, the Great Wall. China vs. Facebook. There's an interesting court battle. "Poke"? C'mon. I was using the "POKE" Applesoft BASIC command over 25 years ago.
Irrelevant, irrelevant, and more irrelevant.
They are not asserting a patent. They are asserting a trademark. Prior art has nothing whatsoever to do with trademarks.
You can claim that a mark is not sufficiently distinctive, or that it infringes an actual trademark that existed before, but you can't invalidate it just because people were using a word that it contains before.
I'm not even close to a lawyer, and I can at least keep that much straight...
Dan Aris
So...is this something that could someday be used to protect magnetic storage media from accidental (or even deliberate) exposure to magnetic fields?
Dan Aris
Well, I'm afraid I don't have any citable source to show you; this is based on the observations and experience of my wife during the 6 years in which she flew to China 5 times/year to visit the factory the company she worked for maintained there.
Similarly, though, I have not heard of loads of villages being displaced/destroyed by big business in China. So I guess we're even :-)
Dan Aris
For instance, underage workers is a serious concern. He represented that he saw underage workers where the correction says that underage workers were rare. If you are interested in this topic, his report would lead you to the false conclusion that underage workers were a problem when they are not. The reality would suggest that some underage workers do slip through the system and Foxconn needs to strengthen their checks rather than an overhaul.
It's important to realize what "underage workers" means, too. It's not children of 6-8 years old being forced to work in abominable conditions. 99% of the time, "underage workers" in China are teenagers who have used their older siblings' IDs to get jobs, so that they can make some more money for themselves or their families.
Certainly it's something that Foxconn and other companies need to be alert for. But it's a far cry from the deliberate abuse that's frequently implied by the phrase "child labour."
Dan Aris
I think people miss that point... the foxconn employees work for foxconn, not apple. Apple pays foxconn what foxconn negotiated.
Foxconn could turn around and ask for more when the contract is up so that it could pay it's workers more, but then some other company would likely outbid them.
Actually, I'm not sure about that. There have been multiple articles pointing out that Foxconn is basically the place that can do what Apple needs at the moment. None of the other companies in China have the kind of muscle behind them to meet Apple's (rather demanding) standards.
Not to say that could never change, but for now, it sounds like Foxconn and Apple have each other right where they want each other.
Dan Aris
sustenance living is impossible when a big factory comes to town and shits on your farmland and pollutes your water supply, as is happening all over china. so unregulated industry destroys the way of life for millions of people, and they have no choice but to go work in that factory.
That...actually doesn't happen very much. The factories tend to be concentrated in areas like Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Dongguan. Sure, there were farms in some of these areas years back, but by and large, they've been urban for a while. And there's a lot of China that's still rural, where the factories don't even want to go. There's just no profit in it.
So, yeah, if you happen to be one of the few hundred—or even few thousand—farmers whose land was taken over or polluted by the factories, then that sucks, and I doubt they received much compensation, because, y'know, mostly-totalitarian regime and all that. But don't forget that that's only 0.00001%-0.0001% of the population. It's hardly a careful, concerted effort to drive people away from subsistence agriculture towards factory life.
And you know what? They don't need any such effort, because the Chinese people are flocking to factory life as fast as they can possibly manage. Subsistence agriculture sucks.
Dan Aris
Don't tell me you don't have something like that in your country. That would be insane.
If we do (in the USA), I've never heard of it, and wouldn't know where to look for it. And I'm pretty well-educated and well-informed. Heck, I worked in the insurance industry for 6 years (albeit the odd corner of it that is workers' compensation).
The "standard" kinds of insurance pretty much every American knows they should get is basically homeowners', automobile, health (+dental, vision), and life. Homeowners' should include flood, earthquake, and tornado for people in the relevant parts of the country.
Other than that, it's (seen as) either for businesses, or weird stuff that only paranoid nutcases would buy.
Dan Aris
If you can show that everything that has ever happened inside the aquarium would have happened exactly like it did without anyone from the outside interfering, you have proved that there was no outside effect.
(Disclaimer: Not actually seeking to argue against your broader thesis, just noticed a possible hole in this piece.)
To some extent, yes, we can measure everything. But we have to be looking.
If a hypothetical God were to influence the world in manners both subtle and far-reaching (because the world is a chaotic system, and tiny inputs can, in the right places and times, have huge effects), how would we be able to prove that it was, in fact, the doing of God?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car takes a wrong turn down a side street, and World War I breaks out. The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts accepts a young aspiring artist named Adolf Hitler, and he never goes on to start the Third Reich.
Unless we can be observing every event—which means, every aspect of every cubic millimeter of the earth, inside and out, including things we currently have no good way to measure, and to a wide radius around it, for events that are initiated in space—we cannot possibly carry out such proof that no outside force acts upon events here.
Dan Aris
That leaves only two moral choices: either Chinese factories must raise their standards to American standards ASAP, or else nearly every single company that sells a product in America needs to be penalized (in America) for not following American labor laws while producing nominally American products.
Fixed that for you.
I mean, seriously, what is with the focus on Apple, when every single reputable report shows that Apple is among the very best when it comes to how they get people treated at the factories producing their stuff?
And honestly, I wouldn't mind too much (though admittedly I don't fully grasp the economics and practicalities of it) if penalties of this sort were applied fairly and reasonably to American companies who have their products produced in factories that adhere to standards lower than what would be legal in America. That would lead pretty quickly to improvement of conditions in China, to the extent that such is possible there.
Dan Aris
Very informative, thanks.
There is one question that I have in my mind after reading this: Isn't the real problem that these games are back in the store after a week? I mean, what kind of games are that? From the games that I bought, maybe one or two would've suffered that fate, simply because they were utterly horrible.
I think that it's less a reflection on the games themselves, as on the attitudes of the gamers. They expect to buy the game, beat it in a week, and bring it back to get a little money back.
The only games that are immune to this are the type that you can't just "beat"—mostly the primarily-online ones.
I find myself a bit boggled by the idea myself, but then, a big part of that is that I don't have 80+ hours over the course of a week to dedicate solely to playing a single video game.
Dan Aris
So, um, what the crap are OLTP and OLAP?
(And yes, this marks me as hopelessly undereducated, and obviously a fool who doesn't know anything about Real Programming. So sue me. Just tell us what they are, too, please?)
Dan Aris
How hard is it to not put your phone into the same pocket as your keys or spare change?
Well, in general, I agree with your post, but for this, I have to say: if I didn't put my phone in the pocket with my keys or the pocket with my spare change, it would have to go into one of the pockets I sit on.
I don't think that's really all that good for it, either.
However, I have an Otterbox Defender case for mine, since I have known for years that I tend to be hard on my devices, not through conscious uncaring, but through clumsiness and carelessness.
Dan Aris
"It's the first article in the constitution. 'Access to information shall not be abridged.'" - Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
Of course, it would have to be supported by language indicating that this means all people must have access without charge or limit (beyond reasonable "you can't surf porn at the internet cafe 24/7" measures) to the means of accessing said information. But Cerf is right, the point shouldn't be Internet access; it should be access to information. The Internet is just our current incarnation of that access, and someday, it will be supplanted by a better or different technology. (Or it will be destroyed in the human-initiated apocalypse. One way or the other.)
Dan Aris