There are two basic options for people here, as it pertains to the astroturfing claim:
1. People use Windows, or
2. People use something else.
Obviously #2 can be expanded into a zillion other different options, but #1 is the important one to break out. If somebody already uses your product, you don't need to preach to them about how great your product is. It's the people in #2 that you have potential to change. That brings it back to the grandparent's point: the people here who don't use Windows aren't likely to change their mind about it as the result of some random commenter. Most of them have very specific qualms about Windows (or Microsoft) that drive their decision not to use it, and most of those people also have equally strong like for whatever OS they do use.
In that sense I have to agree with him. This seems like a really bad place to astroturf.
He could announce that he is taking up sailing like most billionaires and no longer has time to work at Apple and there will still be people at Apple trying to figure out how to remove more buttons from all of their products. There would still be customers because there will still be creative people who need fonts that work and color management you can rely on and a full pro audio subsystem, and Web developers who want to run Apache/PHP/Photoshop, and there would still be poseurs who buy only for the logo and teh shiny.
And the stock would still plummet.
As I said in a previous post, when you invest you're actually betting on the actions of other investors. How many times have we seen a company make $0.90/share profits and drop like a stone because investors expected it to be $0.92? I've even seen some things where a stock beats their estimates, but not as much as people were expecting it to. And drops hard. What a company is doing financially is only useful investment information in that it typically gives you a glimpse into what other investors may be doing before they do it.
Steve Jobs is Apple. He was there, they were okay; he left, they dropped like a stone. He came back, the company is stronger than ever. Random Dude off the street knows it, Investment Guru B knows it, Huge Brokerage House Q knows it. Doesn't mater if his influence is ultimately overstated. If you hold Apple stock when Jobs leaves, you're going to lose a lot of money.
Maybe you make it back later. When "later" is is up to anybody's guess. It could literally take years for investors to become comfortable enough in the company sans Jobs to begin putting money back in. After all, people could easily rationalize it to be leftover success from the Jobs era or even leftover product development from him for quite some time before they start to have to say "yeah, okay, I guess Apple is fine without him."
Ultimately the stock should be okay, but nobody knows when that will be. If I know the stock is going to plummet when he quits or anything happens to him--and I do--then you'd better believe his health status is relevant to my investment decision, and if people are lying about his health to protect their stock prices they're performing illegal acts. If Jobs wants to say "none of your business, buzz off," that's his call (and the stock will go down--just like it did--and he'll be essentially forced to say something, just like he was). But nobody gets to lie (I have no idea whether or not that is the case), and if I have money in his stock and reason to believe I'll lose it based on his health, then using that information to make a decision is absolutely not bullshit.
The smart investor is not buying Apple stock right now. The smart investor is buying Apple stock when something happens with Jobs and the stock hits the bottom. Then you jump in for a bargain on a company that seems to have good potential going forward. Investing now sets you up for a loss, seemingly in the not-too-distant future.
(Disclaimer: I do not invest in Apple, nor do I have any money anywhere in the stock market, nor am I considering investing in Apple or any stocks at this moment.)
Politics and law are too much about nuance that alters the meaning of things we thought we knew for my taste. For example, using your set of choices, my response would be that the Supreme Court has already ruled that citizens are under no obligation to obey an unconstitutional law. The reality is that laws are presupposed to be constitutional until struck down, which makes the statement just a breath away from meaningless in the real world. ("Oopsie! Locked you up for a decade even though you didn't do anything wrong. Sorry, we'll take that off your record!" Yeah, thanks.)
It seems to me that cases like the GP describe are still massive failures of the system. These people weren't immediate dangers to society, at least not based merely on their possessing a gun in violation of that law. The need to jail these people was in no way pressing. Since it's fairly obvious to just about anybody that any gun control measure is going to have constitutional challenges, the trial judge or the immediate appellate judge should have stayed the sentences until the appellate court, at the very least, had a chance to weigh in on the constitutional issues. Personally I would argue that it should have stayed them until the Supreme Court either weighed in or refused to weigh in.
Maybe these people still end up erroneously serving some jail time until another such case falls in front of a different set of judges -- but when we're talking about unlawfully imprisoning people, I think any time we can reduce from faulty sentences is a step in the right direction. I think if you asked the people who served these sentences, they would have been awfully happy to have had an extra year or two of their lives back while appeals worked their way through the courts.
(copyrights precede free speech in the constitution)
It's actually interesting that you bring that up, though in exactly the opposite way that you supposed it was. Your statement makes it sound like coming before it in the text means it was more important, or thought of first. I don't agree that the order, in general, has any specific meaning; I believe you have to take the text as a whole. However, for the sake of argument, let's say it was absolutely true.
Free speech--also known as the first amendment--didn't simply "come after" copyright. It was an amendment to the Constitution. It went through the process that same constitution demanded in order to change anything you please. In that sense the order WAS important; one of the things amendments can do is alter the meanings of the text that had come before (see: slaves as 3/5ths of a man). If we want to discuss whether or not the order matters in determining which takes precedent over the other, it's actually no argument at all: The amendment wins. Whether or not the amendment was intended to (or does) have any effect on that particular passage is a tougher question, but if we've decided, as point of law or just for debate, that the first amendment was meant to affect the passage about copyright, free speech clearly wins.
What are they to do? Nothing. What should they have done? Not passed laws they can't enforce, or tried to enforce them in ways that are clearly not legal.
Politicians simply need to stop thinking they can control the world or get everything they (personally) find morally objectable. It's silly enough when the federal government tries to enforce its morality on the Internet, but it's twice as silly when an individual state purports to have any authority over the rest of the world.
Bad Stuff(tm) will always be on the Internet, and that's just a fact of life. They don't have to like it, but they need to get behind it. They can save a lot of money and trouble for a lot of people simply by coming to that revelation. (And all of this ignores the questions about whether or not it is right to enforce personal moral standards on others, much less others not in your jurisdiction.)
If they really want to help with things, they need to educate people in their jurisdiction to the risks or help those who have already gotten in trouble. EG, if identity-theft.ag really did exist, they should help the people whose identities were stolen to begin rectifying the situation. They're perfectly free to contact legal authorities where the crime is taking place, of course, and see if that leads anywhere. Just assuming they have some sort of authority to stop it independent of that... urgh.
They don't have to actually see your face; they simply need to see the small glow suddenly coming from that field. Since snipers like to use good cover (including darkness where feasible) to protect their positions, carrying what is essentially a flashlight around pointed at yourself won't be good.
The whole point of calling something a "brick" is that's how useful it is - it can't be made to do anything better, ever again
I certainly agree with the first half, but I'm not sure "ever again" needs to be part of the definition. Why shouldn't it be proper to say something is a brick if it can't do anything better unless it's fixed? And how far do we take that? If I can't fix it but I can send it the manufacturer who can, is it bricked? I doubt people would call my hard drive a brick if I bashed it into bits, despite the fact that it'll never be fixed and has absolutely no practical use left.
In other words, all I'm saying is there's some nuance here. No need for anybody to get huffy about somebody calling something that could be fixed a brick.
Nah, the two things really have nothing to do with each other. People who make this link seem to think that if these people hadn't been working on JavaScript for linux apps thing, they would have been off doing Something Really Important(tm). In reality that's not true. Some people aren't cut out for big apps, some people don't know what the next new important thing is, some people don't have the technical skills to do whatever that may be. And more importantly, with open source, people are out to scratch an itch; they're creating something that they themselves might use and find valuable, directly or otherwise. It isn't terribly likely that these folks would have been writing drivers or coding an Exchange killer or what-not had they not been doing this.
More to the point, the statement's not even true on its face. We do get somewhere: we get another way that somebody can contribute to the open source ecosystem, and maybe they'll do that Something Really Important(tm) with it that you seem to be looking for. Somebody who wants to create something wants to create something. They don't want to first spend time learning a new language because it happens to have the appropriate bindings and the one they know and are comfortable with doesn't. Any way to bring more people into the fold is going to be a net positive.
I don't know, it seems he said roughly that. He wasn't as blunt as you, but that last half of the sentence ("a response to today's very tough economic climate") seems to roughly equate with your comment about sales and profits being down and needing to fire some people. As far as saying anything close to "we needed to avoid losing the whole company," people don't say that because it's simply irresponsible. It will create a panic whether there is any reason to panic or not and drop the share prices if it's a publicly-traded company, all for absolutely no benefit.
The first half of the sentence is no doubt an attempt to soften the blow of the latter, but it may (may, I have no idea) also be a glimpse into who was fired. When you're canning people for economic reasons, you can go about it in a lot of different ways. For example:
1. The newest hires; this probably saves the least money (per job), but shows some loyalty to older employees.
2. The oldest hires; this probably saves the most jobs because older employees tend to be paid more, but shows no loyalty and may throw out too much institutional knowledge.
3. Management. This is similar to #2, but may include some higher-priced newer hires. It also risks losing institutional knowledge, and is harder to project the real benefits from it because there likely will be some sort of reorganization costs involved when people are suddenly reporting to a new person and perhaps have new requirements or responsibilities.
4. The highest-paid people. This will be similar to a combination of 2 & 3.
5. Some specific sub-set of people, usually a specific team or division. As a really contrived example, this would be something like a car manufacturer firing the SUV team because they don't plan to make SUVs in the near future. (Yes yes -- they can probably do other things equally well, work with me!)
6. Probably others that aren't coming to mind right now.
If the first half of the statement has a deeper meaning, it sounds like he's saying they chose #5. They fired some people because they had to fire some people, yes, but the people they chose were presumably ones who fit into a business model they're moving away from going forward.
These people are, in part, professional wordsmiths. They may try to couch what they're saying in more comforting terms, for good reasons or bad, but there's always a value to seeing what specific words they chose.
So I am supposed to be grateful to my employees who are overpaid, undermotivated, and accountable to no one?
The OP was pretty obviously a troll, but I think you just went a long way toward proving his point for him. In response to him saying people ("you") "tar all public servents[sic][. . . ]with the same, tired accusations" you simply claim that public servants are overpaid, undermotivated and accountable to no one. It seems to me that's exactly what he said people do.
For the record, none of them are more than passingly true. Government employees almost never make more money than that exact same person with his/her exact same skill set could be making outside of the public sector. While their benefits are good, they almost certainly don't make up the pay differential, even ignoring the fact that many businesses offer similar sets of benefits. They can absolutely be fired, contrary to what so many think, and perfoming one's job poorly is one of the things that can get them canned. Their "protection" is from being fired without cause. And they're accountable to their superiors, while the people who are at the top are in turn accountable to the electorate. If there is any lack of accountability (though I doubt there is, generally speaking), it falls on our shoulders--we're not demanding it strongly enough. Then again we're a nation who damn near re-elected somebody convicted of seven felonies to the US Senate, so that really ought not come as a surprise.
Look, there are lousy public servants just as there are lousy private sector employees, many of whom in both situations may get away with being lousy, and I certainly have more than my fair share of contempt for the vast majority of politicians--but most of these people are good, hard-working people doing their best for rather un-competitive pay. In that I will join the OP: They don't deserve to be shit on as a group because of the handful of incompetent people we hear about, particularly when so many of those very people were put there by our votes. I'm all for criticizing people who deserve to be criticized, but simply reciting old mantras about how crappy government is or painting everybody with the same brush even when the problems exist in the minority don't cut it for me.
Point out somebody not doing their job, point out some evidence to back that up -- I'll hop right on board with you and call them out. But not when the rants are about teh gubmint or any large sub-section of it.
This isn't exactly what we asked for, but heh, that doesn't matter does it? Who cares, you got something, you should be happy.
It seems to me that the grandparent made a fair point, regardless of whether or not you mock it. Why should Microsoft have to assign a monetary value to WMP, deduct that value from the cost of Windows without WMP, and yet still provide you all of their codecs that they developed for WMP to use? Besides which, if this poster was correct (and I really have no idea), Microsoft tried to simply remove the executable and was further scolded by EU courts until they removed the DLLs as well.
It seems to me that the GUI is going to be a relatively small fraction of the costs of the development of a browser or media player or what have you. Besides which, we're constantly saying here that the marginal cost of software is 0 when we're talking about piracy, but we're demanding Microsoft deduct essentially a marginal cost from copies of Windows? And complaining when they claim it's zero?
So far as insulting peoples' statements go, the most idiotic one I've seen in this thread thus far has been yours: "I would be happy to see Windows banned."
Given the directory layout of where you're sending people, that'll be fun on a command line FTP client.
How will they get an FTP client? Clearly, bundling one hurts the market shares of FileZilla and SmartFTP and anybody else who makes FTP clients, therefore it must be forbidden!
Nonetheless, there has to be some point at which Product B's success isn't illegal just because of the existence of Product A. Simply being a monopoly isn't illegal, it's how you use it. If IE's marketshare was 10%, we wouldn't be complaining about Windows' monopoly influence. The grandparent seems to be indicating he feels 70-80%, where IE is currently, is low enough to be at that point.
It's hard to argue that Microsoft didn't, in the past, successfully use their monopoly status (at least in part) to destroy competition in the browser market. It's much harder, in my mind, to think that they're continuing to do so--and thus that we need to take any action to protect that competition at Microsoft's expense going forward. If we want to punish them for past acts, no problem; I'm on board. Let's fine their asses and be done with it. I just honestly don't think Firefox or Opera or Safari needs court protection from IE anymore, and I say that as somebody who primarily uses Firefox and has to spend hours of time during his job doing web development wrangling with crappy standards support from IE. (And, if it's somehow germane to the discussion, runs linux on his primary box.)
It isn't bad coding to write pages that work on 70% of computers, even if those 70% are using broken browser.
Erm -- yes it is, and as somebody who seems to have claimed in a previous post that he's a web developer (or at the very least took upon himself authority to speak for them), I would think you'd understand that. Apparently people (you?) "spend 50% of [their] time working around MS's noncompliance," but it's also not bad coding for them to ignore other browsers and standards? According to you I can save myself 50% of my time and not be a bad coder, all I have to do is code directly for IE. That's really pretty sweet, but somehow I doubt the people who pay me would agree. Perhaps if you took a beer down and passed it around, they'd warm up to it.
You probably would have had a point if this was 15 years ago and IE really was virtually the only browser anybody used. Maybe then working on anything other than catering to them would have been stupid. That time has long since passed. Professionals code to the standards and then hack IE into compliance, and the only thing that's going to change that now is IE itself living up to standards. Sizable portions of people--if not a majority--also now know there are alternative browser choices, regardless of whether or not they ultimately can or choose to use them. Frankly I don't see what threat allowing IE to be part of Windows poses, and "OMG THE LAWWWW" is nothing but an appeal to authority. Maybe the EU needs to adhere, but hiding behind that fact as some sort of support for your argument is silly.
As far as stifling innovation goes, I tend to agree in principal. However I'll also note that IE's marketshare has plummeted in the last few years because of competition primarily from Firefox. In other words, the innovation that is now bringing down the 800 pound gorilla actually occurred in large part when IE had market shares in the mid-to-high 90s. Simply being a monopoly is not against the law, and with market shares dropping steadily for IE I'd have a hard time claiming with a straight face that they're successfully using their Windows monopoly to secure an IE monoply, however successful the strategy may have been in the past.
Has Bush Derangement Syndrome gotten so bad that saying anything good about Bush is taboo? Or was this a simple, innocent oversight?
Perhaps they simply didn't find it relevant. It certainly has no bearing on the pros or cons of such technology, and if they're trying to get the average person to consider such a system, telling them that somebody so rich they once owned a professional baseball team uses one isn't going to get it done either.
Honestly, they simply need to provide some sample numbers (obviously they'll vary depending on where you are and who installs, etc): The systems cost about $X, they cost about $Y per year to operate, you save about $Z dollars per year. If they're feeling extra helpful they can do the math for you and tell you where your break-even date is. That sort of thing is going to be much more helpful than whether or not George Bush owns one.
I wouldn't preclude somebody without knowledge of a particular field from managing it, if I'm confident that they are smart and dedicated enough to quickly pick up a quantity of information.
That said, the best managers are going to be option 3: 1 & 2. If you don't know how to manage, or if you're at the senior-most levels of an agency yet bogged down in informational details and micromanaging rather than big-picture leadership, you're not going to be effective. Likewise, if you know nothing about what you're managing you're going to be fairly useless whenever a situation arises that your advisers don't all agree on.
If you want to take a really jaded look at people who fall only into camp #2, you can say they leave themselves exceptionally vulnerable to underlings with agendas giving them erroneous information or hiding other sides of the argument because they know their managers don't know any better. Yes, hopefully these people are found out and eventually fired, but how long does it take and how much damage may be done in the interim?
Most people can learn both camps if they lack in either one. They can learn enough details to make responsible decisions if they're intelligent and dedicated to doing so, and they can also learn how to be better managers and who in their groups they can rely on. People who lack one or both and refuse to work on it, however, are simply doomed to be ineffective, inefficient managers. I do find it hard to believe that in a nation of 300 million people we can't find enough qualified people who fit both bills to simply start off with them at the helm, but if I had to choose somebody who lacked one or the other I'd rather start off with people who know their stuff but aren't great managers. I'd rather the right things happen too slowly than the wrong things happen quickly. Plus, I think it's easier to learn how to manage than to learn a respectable level of detail with subjects as complicated as scientific fields or energy policy or military action or whatever leadership position we're talking about.
I sincerely hope that too. I have no idea where "[presidential candidate] is an average person like me" suddenly became a virtue, but it's disheartening. I won't speak for anybody else, but I don't want the president or other high-ranking officials to be average or as smart as me. I want them to be brilliant. I want them to be so brilliant that no matter how smart I am, I feel like an idiot every time he speaks.
Obviously there are other qualities that are important. Being brilliant is essentially meaningless if it also means indecisive. But yes, I want politicians who hear all sides of arguments, consider all sides of arguments--UNDERSTAND all sides of arguments. Then make whatever choice they think is the best based on their intelligence and the knowledge they've just gained. I have no idea why we would settle for less, but we consistently do. There are certainly many others on both sides of the isle, but Bush would have to be the poster child for people with mediocre minds and no concern for expert opinion doing whatever they please without hearing from anybody who disagrees.
That's certainly a valid perspective, but it is only one perspective. Look at it from another:
The ostensible purpose of this program is to get older cars off the streets and replace them with more fuel-efficient models (though personally I think it's more about trying to get people to buy new cars in a crappy economy, but I digress). So of course, if you're one of the people who already made that decision of their own volition they don't need to convince you. It's not "punishment," they're just giving an economic incentive to reach some goal and you're waiting for them at the finish line.
It reminds me of train tickets where I live. If you don't buy the ticket before you board, you have to pay $2 more to buy passage from the conductor on the train*. Most people naturally see this as a punishment for being a few minutes late or as some sort of scam by the train company to make a few extra bucks for essentially the same level of work. Again, it's not an invalid perspective -- but the other side is to view it as the train operators providing an economic disincentive to take up more of the conductor's time on the train. It's kind of the opposite of this.
When you want to get people to do something, talking to their wallet is a good way. Whether it's punishing them for not doing what you want or incentivizing them to do so. It's not efficient from any perspective, if that is your goal, to hit people already doing what you want.
As I said, I don't really buy the motivation that's being expressed. If we take them at their word, however, I think what they're doing is entirely reasonable (ignoring whether or not they SHOULD do it--which is a debate about the role of government and not what I'm going for). I'd be much more inclined to jump to your defense if they were offering it as part of the economic stimulus or presenting it as a middle-income bailout.
As far as insulting people who don't drive fuel efficient vehicles or intimating that they don't deserve government aid... come on now, being upset is fine but that's a bit too far.
(* Assuming the ticket window was open at your stop; they don't charge extra if it wasn't.)
All of this may be true (though much is simple opinion); for the sake of argument, let's assume it is. It's still a risky business to buy Apple stock right now.
The reality in investing is that you're not directly investing in the (perceived) knowledge that the company is going to do well -- you're investing in the perception of other investors that the company is going to do well. And by "do well," I mean "make the investors a profit." This is true of professionals and big-business funds as much as for individuals.
For the people who spend a lot of time and effort investigating stocks they may agree that Apple is a strong company. However, that doesn't matter one lick if enough people take the "what I saw on TV" approach and only see that Apple tanked when Jobs left and is now stronger than ever before since hes come back, and then panic and sell their stocks.
In fact, major investors should probably join in if that's what they perceive is going to happen -- you sell now, make some money, watch it tank tomorrow and then buy. (I actually think there is a way to do that without all the work--somehow with options--but I'm not a stock market guy and, really, it's also not relevant to my point.) You end up with essentially the same shares you had today but you pocket some cash in the interim. And if you really do believe it's a strong fundamental company, it should go back up a bit after the panic subsides.
If you have any belief it's going to tank tomorrow, wait until tomorrow to invest (where "tomorrow" is "some point in the future when you think it's the bottom"). You're playing more against other investors than with/against the company you're investing in and we've seen some sizable down-turns whenever a rumor about Jobs' health surfaces--and this appears to be more than a rumor. Assuming investors are basically interested in the company's fundamentals is generally a good assumption, but you're still going to get whacked around quite a bit. Anticipating the mood swings can be as valuable as anything else.
I honestly don't know where the judge pulled that nonsense from. The story talks about the teen planning to frame his father and position the crime as a murder-suicide. That doesn't sound like something a person does if they have no idea it's wrong, nor even like something they would do if they didn't understand dead is permanent. I don't know about you, but if I'm playing some FPS with respawns I don't tend to take the time to position their bodies so the next alien patrol doesn't blame me.
There's something wrong with this kid, but not insanity as it is defined for a legal defense, nor do I buy the "he didn't know what death meant!" crap. Perhaps he's simply a sociopath.
Me, I'd love to be in a higher tax bracket. I'd have *more money*.
Probably, but not definitely. As some other people have mentioned, the Alternative Minimum Tax is tripping more and more families up. But more simply, realize that when you're quoting from the tax tables like that that you're talking about the taxes your income asses on you. This is not necessarily the same as the amount of taxes you pay.
For example, many tax rebates (the child tax credit leaping immediately to mind) have income cut-offs; you don't get the extra money off your tax bill once you start making more than $X. If $X is less than $tax_deduction more than you're making now, you effectively lose money. (Actually I think the window is even slightly smaller than that due to the point at which tax credits are applied, but it's late and I don't want to check the math.)
These are, of course, fringe cases -- but really that's what the misconception was about anyway; people who were just below some line but are now just above end up shafted. That actually may be true, the line just isn't the top/bottom of tax brackets, unless of course the top of a tax bracket was used to determine a cutoff.
Oh, I don't know. For starters, it seems that executives that ride a company into the ground do tend to find work elsewhere. But more than that, I'm sure there's somebody out there who would give him an interview for the same reasons he was hired in the first place. I have no idea what those are, since I know little about him in general and nothing about him prior to SCO and the lawsuits, but I presume he did something that people thought was worthy of giving (another?) CEO title to.
As for the SCO part of the resume, he probably CAN spin it. Maybe he can spin it as how long he was able to keep a dead company from rotting away; remember, he's not the only person at SCO who profits from this staying alive. Maybe he claims he was ordered from above to pursue it. Or, hell, just claim it was actually a legal disagreement. Corporate boards deal with enough legal issues that they know things aren't always clear, I don't think any of them would have trouble believing their lawyers' interpretation of something is different than another companies' lawyers, or even what was ultimately ruled.
He might struggle for a little bit (to find new work--he's successfully milked SCO for a metric fuckton of money), but I think "[he] knows he will never get another job as an executive" is optimistic at this point.
As he should. The government shouldn't get a free pass, even on people who actually are guilty. They need to prove their case and do it within the constructs of the laws and protections we've established through the centuries. Likewise, so far as the jury is concerned, it's better for them to err on the side of caution if they have any doubts about the person's guilt.
It's sad that guilty people sometimes go free, but it's much more sad when innocent people are put in jail. Guilty and innocent alike deserve the same protections and representations. If I were a defense attorney, I would not ask any questions that even came close to asking a client if he was actually guilty; I wouldn't want to know.
The most important thing is the process, not the outcome.
I understand the spirit of your proposal and I do support that spirit, but in reality it's not practical.
To show one of many major faults with the plan, please answer this question: Do you have a constitutional right to own a gun? Now discuss it with others on slashdot and see if everybody can agree with you. Ask a federal judge if the US Department of Education is unconstitutional -- and then ask around here.
Not everything later determined to be a violation of the Constitution is malevolent or a power-grab, and not everything determined to be constitutional goes without question. There are legitimate disagreements about what things mean and how far they apply. There are disagreements about what trumps what when there are conflicts of power. (The president is commander and chief and Congress declares war; if no war is declared, can the president send troops off to fight? Put another way, is the War Powers Act constitutional?)
The idea that people should be able to be put in jail for these disagreements--particularly if you're including legislatures (ie, political bodies) to determine who's violated these rules--is silly.
Another major flaw: Who is responsible? Sometimes power-grabs are relatively obvious. What happens if Congress passes an unconstitutional law? Are we sewing prisoner numbers on 268 or more new suits, one for every person who voted for it? Just the people who sponsored it? What if only part of the law was struck down -- who's responsible then? Still 268 people? Whomever wrote that section? Do we need SVN changelogs for congressional bills?
And there are even more, but I think you get the point. This isn't a simple issue, and ultimately the constitution foresaw the potential for corruption and provided a means to fix it. We call them elections. If people continue to re-elect those who pass these laws, or get indicted (can you believe Ted Stevens almost won re-election?!) then we simply deserve the government we get.
Of cause a private company or person is legally allowed to censor as they like, but that does not make it morally acceptable.
The problem is that freedom works both ways. Yes, freedom of speech is a good thing even when it's a corporation and not the government on the other end of the line (I think we can all agree government censorship is bad, so let's leave that part out of the discussion). It's good that people be free to discuss things, even things that may offend others.
But it's equally the right of those people to decide they don't want to hear it. They're free to only associate with those they please by whatever criteria they choose; they're free to set up a club--or in this case a community--with guidelines of their choosing, and to ask people to leave if they decide that their freedom to say whatever they please outweighs everybody else's right to associate only with those they please. Most people consider this to be a perfectly fair trade-off; you have the right to speak, but nobody has to give you a forum to do so.
Personally, I have no problem with pictures of mothers breast feeding. I also have no problem with the creator's of a website determining the rules, even if they use silly criteria I don't agree with. My biggest problem is people like you who always claim to bring the authority of morality to the table. It's not that cut and dried, and even if it were it's only YOUR set of morals. If history has shown us anything, it's that nobody everybody holds the same moral values, and there's not necessarily a right or wrong. A lot of people have died to teach us that lesson.
If you want to protest in hopes that Facebook changes their policies or makes an exception, swell -- but let's not pretend you're morally superior if they ignore you. In the meantime go set up mothersbreastfeedingpics.com and give those people a voice. Freedom for all, that's how it's supposed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two basic options for people here, as it pertains to the astroturfing claim:
1. People use Windows, or
2. People use something else.
Obviously #2 can be expanded into a zillion other different options, but #1 is the important one to break out. If somebody already uses your product, you don't need to preach to them about how great your product is. It's the people in #2 that you have potential to change. That brings it back to the grandparent's point: the people here who don't use Windows aren't likely to change their mind about it as the result of some random commenter. Most of them have very specific qualms about Windows (or Microsoft) that drive their decision not to use it, and most of those people also have equally strong like for whatever OS they do use.
In that sense I have to agree with him. This seems like a really bad place to astroturf.
And the stock would still plummet.
As I said in a previous post, when you invest you're actually betting on the actions of other investors. How many times have we seen a company make $0.90/share profits and drop like a stone because investors expected it to be $0.92? I've even seen some things where a stock beats their estimates, but not as much as people were expecting it to. And drops hard. What a company is doing financially is only useful investment information in that it typically gives you a glimpse into what other investors may be doing before they do it.
Steve Jobs is Apple. He was there, they were okay; he left, they dropped like a stone. He came back, the company is stronger than ever. Random Dude off the street knows it, Investment Guru B knows it, Huge Brokerage House Q knows it. Doesn't mater if his influence is ultimately overstated. If you hold Apple stock when Jobs leaves, you're going to lose a lot of money.
Maybe you make it back later. When "later" is is up to anybody's guess. It could literally take years for investors to become comfortable enough in the company sans Jobs to begin putting money back in. After all, people could easily rationalize it to be leftover success from the Jobs era or even leftover product development from him for quite some time before they start to have to say "yeah, okay, I guess Apple is fine without him."
Ultimately the stock should be okay, but nobody knows when that will be. If I know the stock is going to plummet when he quits or anything happens to him--and I do--then you'd better believe his health status is relevant to my investment decision, and if people are lying about his health to protect their stock prices they're performing illegal acts. If Jobs wants to say "none of your business, buzz off," that's his call (and the stock will go down--just like it did--and he'll be essentially forced to say something, just like he was). But nobody gets to lie (I have no idea whether or not that is the case), and if I have money in his stock and reason to believe I'll lose it based on his health, then using that information to make a decision is absolutely not bullshit.
The smart investor is not buying Apple stock right now. The smart investor is buying Apple stock when something happens with Jobs and the stock hits the bottom. Then you jump in for a bargain on a company that seems to have good potential going forward. Investing now sets you up for a loss, seemingly in the not-too-distant future.
(Disclaimer: I do not invest in Apple, nor do I have any money anywhere in the stock market, nor am I considering investing in Apple or any stocks at this moment.)
Politics and law are too much about nuance that alters the meaning of things we thought we knew for my taste. For example, using your set of choices, my response would be that the Supreme Court has already ruled that citizens are under no obligation to obey an unconstitutional law. The reality is that laws are presupposed to be constitutional until struck down, which makes the statement just a breath away from meaningless in the real world. ("Oopsie! Locked you up for a decade even though you didn't do anything wrong. Sorry, we'll take that off your record!" Yeah, thanks.)
It seems to me that cases like the GP describe are still massive failures of the system. These people weren't immediate dangers to society, at least not based merely on their possessing a gun in violation of that law. The need to jail these people was in no way pressing. Since it's fairly obvious to just about anybody that any gun control measure is going to have constitutional challenges, the trial judge or the immediate appellate judge should have stayed the sentences until the appellate court, at the very least, had a chance to weigh in on the constitutional issues. Personally I would argue that it should have stayed them until the Supreme Court either weighed in or refused to weigh in.
Maybe these people still end up erroneously serving some jail time until another such case falls in front of a different set of judges -- but when we're talking about unlawfully imprisoning people, I think any time we can reduce from faulty sentences is a step in the right direction. I think if you asked the people who served these sentences, they would have been awfully happy to have had an extra year or two of their lives back while appeals worked their way through the courts.
It's actually interesting that you bring that up, though in exactly the opposite way that you supposed it was. Your statement makes it sound like coming before it in the text means it was more important, or thought of first. I don't agree that the order, in general, has any specific meaning; I believe you have to take the text as a whole. However, for the sake of argument, let's say it was absolutely true.
Free speech--also known as the first amendment--didn't simply "come after" copyright. It was an amendment to the Constitution. It went through the process that same constitution demanded in order to change anything you please. In that sense the order WAS important; one of the things amendments can do is alter the meanings of the text that had come before (see: slaves as 3/5ths of a man). If we want to discuss whether or not the order matters in determining which takes precedent over the other, it's actually no argument at all: The amendment wins. Whether or not the amendment was intended to (or does) have any effect on that particular passage is a tougher question, but if we've decided, as point of law or just for debate, that the first amendment was meant to affect the passage about copyright, free speech clearly wins.
What are they to do? Nothing. What should they have done? Not passed laws they can't enforce, or tried to enforce them in ways that are clearly not legal.
Politicians simply need to stop thinking they can control the world or get everything they (personally) find morally objectable. It's silly enough when the federal government tries to enforce its morality on the Internet, but it's twice as silly when an individual state purports to have any authority over the rest of the world.
Bad Stuff(tm) will always be on the Internet, and that's just a fact of life. They don't have to like it, but they need to get behind it. They can save a lot of money and trouble for a lot of people simply by coming to that revelation. (And all of this ignores the questions about whether or not it is right to enforce personal moral standards on others, much less others not in your jurisdiction.)
If they really want to help with things, they need to educate people in their jurisdiction to the risks or help those who have already gotten in trouble. EG, if identity-theft.ag really did exist, they should help the people whose identities were stolen to begin rectifying the situation. They're perfectly free to contact legal authorities where the crime is taking place, of course, and see if that leads anywhere. Just assuming they have some sort of authority to stop it independent of that... urgh.
They don't have to actually see your face; they simply need to see the small glow suddenly coming from that field. Since snipers like to use good cover (including darkness where feasible) to protect their positions, carrying what is essentially a flashlight around pointed at yourself won't be good.
I certainly agree with the first half, but I'm not sure "ever again" needs to be part of the definition. Why shouldn't it be proper to say something is a brick if it can't do anything better unless it's fixed? And how far do we take that? If I can't fix it but I can send it the manufacturer who can, is it bricked? I doubt people would call my hard drive a brick if I bashed it into bits, despite the fact that it'll never be fixed and has absolutely no practical use left.
In other words, all I'm saying is there's some nuance here. No need for anybody to get huffy about somebody calling something that could be fixed a brick.
Nah, the two things really have nothing to do with each other. People who make this link seem to think that if these people hadn't been working on JavaScript for linux apps thing, they would have been off doing Something Really Important(tm). In reality that's not true. Some people aren't cut out for big apps, some people don't know what the next new important thing is, some people don't have the technical skills to do whatever that may be. And more importantly, with open source, people are out to scratch an itch; they're creating something that they themselves might use and find valuable, directly or otherwise. It isn't terribly likely that these folks would have been writing drivers or coding an Exchange killer or what-not had they not been doing this.
More to the point, the statement's not even true on its face. We do get somewhere: we get another way that somebody can contribute to the open source ecosystem, and maybe they'll do that Something Really Important(tm) with it that you seem to be looking for. Somebody who wants to create something wants to create something. They don't want to first spend time learning a new language because it happens to have the appropriate bindings and the one they know and are comfortable with doesn't. Any way to bring more people into the fold is going to be a net positive.
I don't know, it seems he said roughly that. He wasn't as blunt as you, but that last half of the sentence ("a response to today's very tough economic climate") seems to roughly equate with your comment about sales and profits being down and needing to fire some people. As far as saying anything close to "we needed to avoid losing the whole company," people don't say that because it's simply irresponsible. It will create a panic whether there is any reason to panic or not and drop the share prices if it's a publicly-traded company, all for absolutely no benefit.
The first half of the sentence is no doubt an attempt to soften the blow of the latter, but it may (may, I have no idea) also be a glimpse into who was fired. When you're canning people for economic reasons, you can go about it in a lot of different ways. For example:
1. The newest hires; this probably saves the least money (per job), but shows some loyalty to older employees.
2. The oldest hires; this probably saves the most jobs because older employees tend to be paid more, but shows no loyalty and may throw out too much institutional knowledge.
3. Management. This is similar to #2, but may include some higher-priced newer hires. It also risks losing institutional knowledge, and is harder to project the real benefits from it because there likely will be some sort of reorganization costs involved when people are suddenly reporting to a new person and perhaps have new requirements or responsibilities.
4. The highest-paid people. This will be similar to a combination of 2 & 3.
5. Some specific sub-set of people, usually a specific team or division. As a really contrived example, this would be something like a car manufacturer firing the SUV team because they don't plan to make SUVs in the near future. (Yes yes -- they can probably do other things equally well, work with me!)
6. Probably others that aren't coming to mind right now.
If the first half of the statement has a deeper meaning, it sounds like he's saying they chose #5. They fired some people because they had to fire some people, yes, but the people they chose were presumably ones who fit into a business model they're moving away from going forward.
These people are, in part, professional wordsmiths. They may try to couch what they're saying in more comforting terms, for good reasons or bad, but there's always a value to seeing what specific words they chose.
The OP was pretty obviously a troll, but I think you just went a long way toward proving his point for him. In response to him saying people ("you") "tar all public servents[sic][. . . ]with the same, tired accusations" you simply claim that public servants are overpaid, undermotivated and accountable to no one. It seems to me that's exactly what he said people do.
For the record, none of them are more than passingly true. Government employees almost never make more money than that exact same person with his/her exact same skill set could be making outside of the public sector. While their benefits are good, they almost certainly don't make up the pay differential, even ignoring the fact that many businesses offer similar sets of benefits. They can absolutely be fired, contrary to what so many think, and perfoming one's job poorly is one of the things that can get them canned. Their "protection" is from being fired without cause. And they're accountable to their superiors, while the people who are at the top are in turn accountable to the electorate. If there is any lack of accountability (though I doubt there is, generally speaking), it falls on our shoulders--we're not demanding it strongly enough. Then again we're a nation who damn near re-elected somebody convicted of seven felonies to the US Senate, so that really ought not come as a surprise.
Look, there are lousy public servants just as there are lousy private sector employees, many of whom in both situations may get away with being lousy, and I certainly have more than my fair share of contempt for the vast majority of politicians--but most of these people are good, hard-working people doing their best for rather un-competitive pay. In that I will join the OP: They don't deserve to be shit on as a group because of the handful of incompetent people we hear about, particularly when so many of those very people were put there by our votes. I'm all for criticizing people who deserve to be criticized, but simply reciting old mantras about how crappy government is or painting everybody with the same brush even when the problems exist in the minority don't cut it for me.
Point out somebody not doing their job, point out some evidence to back that up -- I'll hop right on board with you and call them out. But not when the rants are about teh gubmint or any large sub-section of it.
It seems to me that the grandparent made a fair point, regardless of whether or not you mock it. Why should Microsoft have to assign a monetary value to WMP, deduct that value from the cost of Windows without WMP, and yet still provide you all of their codecs that they developed for WMP to use? Besides which, if this poster was correct (and I really have no idea), Microsoft tried to simply remove the executable and was further scolded by EU courts until they removed the DLLs as well.
It seems to me that the GUI is going to be a relatively small fraction of the costs of the development of a browser or media player or what have you. Besides which, we're constantly saying here that the marginal cost of software is 0 when we're talking about piracy, but we're demanding Microsoft deduct essentially a marginal cost from copies of Windows? And complaining when they claim it's zero?
So far as insulting peoples' statements go, the most idiotic one I've seen in this thread thus far has been yours: "I would be happy to see Windows banned."
How will they get an FTP client? Clearly, bundling one hurts the market shares of FileZilla and SmartFTP and anybody else who makes FTP clients, therefore it must be forbidden!
Nonetheless, there has to be some point at which Product B's success isn't illegal just because of the existence of Product A. Simply being a monopoly isn't illegal, it's how you use it. If IE's marketshare was 10%, we wouldn't be complaining about Windows' monopoly influence. The grandparent seems to be indicating he feels 70-80%, where IE is currently, is low enough to be at that point.
It's hard to argue that Microsoft didn't, in the past, successfully use their monopoly status (at least in part) to destroy competition in the browser market. It's much harder, in my mind, to think that they're continuing to do so--and thus that we need to take any action to protect that competition at Microsoft's expense going forward. If we want to punish them for past acts, no problem; I'm on board. Let's fine their asses and be done with it. I just honestly don't think Firefox or Opera or Safari needs court protection from IE anymore, and I say that as somebody who primarily uses Firefox and has to spend hours of time during his job doing web development wrangling with crappy standards support from IE. (And, if it's somehow germane to the discussion, runs linux on his primary box.)
Erm -- yes it is, and as somebody who seems to have claimed in a previous post that he's a web developer (or at the very least took upon himself authority to speak for them), I would think you'd understand that. Apparently people (you?) "spend 50% of [their] time working around MS's noncompliance," but it's also not bad coding for them to ignore other browsers and standards? According to you I can save myself 50% of my time and not be a bad coder, all I have to do is code directly for IE. That's really pretty sweet, but somehow I doubt the people who pay me would agree. Perhaps if you took a beer down and passed it around, they'd warm up to it.
You probably would have had a point if this was 15 years ago and IE really was virtually the only browser anybody used. Maybe then working on anything other than catering to them would have been stupid. That time has long since passed. Professionals code to the standards and then hack IE into compliance, and the only thing that's going to change that now is IE itself living up to standards. Sizable portions of people--if not a majority--also now know there are alternative browser choices, regardless of whether or not they ultimately can or choose to use them. Frankly I don't see what threat allowing IE to be part of Windows poses, and "OMG THE LAWWWW" is nothing but an appeal to authority. Maybe the EU needs to adhere, but hiding behind that fact as some sort of support for your argument is silly.
As far as stifling innovation goes, I tend to agree in principal. However I'll also note that IE's marketshare has plummeted in the last few years because of competition primarily from Firefox. In other words, the innovation that is now bringing down the 800 pound gorilla actually occurred in large part when IE had market shares in the mid-to-high 90s. Simply being a monopoly is not against the law, and with market shares dropping steadily for IE I'd have a hard time claiming with a straight face that they're successfully using their Windows monopoly to secure an IE monoply, however successful the strategy may have been in the past.
Perhaps they simply didn't find it relevant. It certainly has no bearing on the pros or cons of such technology, and if they're trying to get the average person to consider such a system, telling them that somebody so rich they once owned a professional baseball team uses one isn't going to get it done either.
Honestly, they simply need to provide some sample numbers (obviously they'll vary depending on where you are and who installs, etc): The systems cost about $X, they cost about $Y per year to operate, you save about $Z dollars per year. If they're feeling extra helpful they can do the math for you and tell you where your break-even date is. That sort of thing is going to be much more helpful than whether or not George Bush owns one.
I wouldn't preclude somebody without knowledge of a particular field from managing it, if I'm confident that they are smart and dedicated enough to quickly pick up a quantity of information.
That said, the best managers are going to be option 3: 1 & 2. If you don't know how to manage, or if you're at the senior-most levels of an agency yet bogged down in informational details and micromanaging rather than big-picture leadership, you're not going to be effective. Likewise, if you know nothing about what you're managing you're going to be fairly useless whenever a situation arises that your advisers don't all agree on.
If you want to take a really jaded look at people who fall only into camp #2, you can say they leave themselves exceptionally vulnerable to underlings with agendas giving them erroneous information or hiding other sides of the argument because they know their managers don't know any better. Yes, hopefully these people are found out and eventually fired, but how long does it take and how much damage may be done in the interim?
Most people can learn both camps if they lack in either one. They can learn enough details to make responsible decisions if they're intelligent and dedicated to doing so, and they can also learn how to be better managers and who in their groups they can rely on. People who lack one or both and refuse to work on it, however, are simply doomed to be ineffective, inefficient managers. I do find it hard to believe that in a nation of 300 million people we can't find enough qualified people who fit both bills to simply start off with them at the helm, but if I had to choose somebody who lacked one or the other I'd rather start off with people who know their stuff but aren't great managers. I'd rather the right things happen too slowly than the wrong things happen quickly. Plus, I think it's easier to learn how to manage than to learn a respectable level of detail with subjects as complicated as scientific fields or energy policy or military action or whatever leadership position we're talking about.
I sincerely hope that too. I have no idea where "[presidential candidate] is an average person like me" suddenly became a virtue, but it's disheartening. I won't speak for anybody else, but I don't want the president or other high-ranking officials to be average or as smart as me. I want them to be brilliant. I want them to be so brilliant that no matter how smart I am, I feel like an idiot every time he speaks.
Obviously there are other qualities that are important. Being brilliant is essentially meaningless if it also means indecisive. But yes, I want politicians who hear all sides of arguments, consider all sides of arguments--UNDERSTAND all sides of arguments. Then make whatever choice they think is the best based on their intelligence and the knowledge they've just gained. I have no idea why we would settle for less, but we consistently do. There are certainly many others on both sides of the isle, but Bush would have to be the poster child for people with mediocre minds and no concern for expert opinion doing whatever they please without hearing from anybody who disagrees.
That's certainly a valid perspective, but it is only one perspective. Look at it from another:
The ostensible purpose of this program is to get older cars off the streets and replace them with more fuel-efficient models (though personally I think it's more about trying to get people to buy new cars in a crappy economy, but I digress). So of course, if you're one of the people who already made that decision of their own volition they don't need to convince you. It's not "punishment," they're just giving an economic incentive to reach some goal and you're waiting for them at the finish line.
It reminds me of train tickets where I live. If you don't buy the ticket before you board, you have to pay $2 more to buy passage from the conductor on the train*. Most people naturally see this as a punishment for being a few minutes late or as some sort of scam by the train company to make a few extra bucks for essentially the same level of work. Again, it's not an invalid perspective -- but the other side is to view it as the train operators providing an economic disincentive to take up more of the conductor's time on the train. It's kind of the opposite of this.
When you want to get people to do something, talking to their wallet is a good way. Whether it's punishing them for not doing what you want or incentivizing them to do so. It's not efficient from any perspective, if that is your goal, to hit people already doing what you want.
As I said, I don't really buy the motivation that's being expressed. If we take them at their word, however, I think what they're doing is entirely reasonable (ignoring whether or not they SHOULD do it--which is a debate about the role of government and not what I'm going for). I'd be much more inclined to jump to your defense if they were offering it as part of the economic stimulus or presenting it as a middle-income bailout.
As far as insulting people who don't drive fuel efficient vehicles or intimating that they don't deserve government aid... come on now, being upset is fine but that's a bit too far.
(* Assuming the ticket window was open at your stop; they don't charge extra if it wasn't.)
All of this may be true (though much is simple opinion); for the sake of argument, let's assume it is. It's still a risky business to buy Apple stock right now.
The reality in investing is that you're not directly investing in the (perceived) knowledge that the company is going to do well -- you're investing in the perception of other investors that the company is going to do well. And by "do well," I mean "make the investors a profit." This is true of professionals and big-business funds as much as for individuals.
For the people who spend a lot of time and effort investigating stocks they may agree that Apple is a strong company. However, that doesn't matter one lick if enough people take the "what I saw on TV" approach and only see that Apple tanked when Jobs left and is now stronger than ever before since hes come back, and then panic and sell their stocks.
In fact, major investors should probably join in if that's what they perceive is going to happen -- you sell now, make some money, watch it tank tomorrow and then buy. (I actually think there is a way to do that without all the work--somehow with options--but I'm not a stock market guy and, really, it's also not relevant to my point.) You end up with essentially the same shares you had today but you pocket some cash in the interim. And if you really do believe it's a strong fundamental company, it should go back up a bit after the panic subsides.
If you have any belief it's going to tank tomorrow, wait until tomorrow to invest (where "tomorrow" is "some point in the future when you think it's the bottom"). You're playing more against other investors than with/against the company you're investing in and we've seen some sizable down-turns whenever a rumor about Jobs' health surfaces--and this appears to be more than a rumor. Assuming investors are basically interested in the company's fundamentals is generally a good assumption, but you're still going to get whacked around quite a bit. Anticipating the mood swings can be as valuable as anything else.
I honestly don't know where the judge pulled that nonsense from. The story talks about the teen planning to frame his father and position the crime as a murder-suicide. That doesn't sound like something a person does if they have no idea it's wrong, nor even like something they would do if they didn't understand dead is permanent. I don't know about you, but if I'm playing some FPS with respawns I don't tend to take the time to position their bodies so the next alien patrol doesn't blame me.
There's something wrong with this kid, but not insanity as it is defined for a legal defense, nor do I buy the "he didn't know what death meant!" crap. Perhaps he's simply a sociopath.
Probably, but not definitely. As some other people have mentioned, the Alternative Minimum Tax is tripping more and more families up. But more simply, realize that when you're quoting from the tax tables like that that you're talking about the taxes your income asses on you. This is not necessarily the same as the amount of taxes you pay.
For example, many tax rebates (the child tax credit leaping immediately to mind) have income cut-offs; you don't get the extra money off your tax bill once you start making more than $X. If $X is less than $tax_deduction more than you're making now, you effectively lose money. (Actually I think the window is even slightly smaller than that due to the point at which tax credits are applied, but it's late and I don't want to check the math.)
These are, of course, fringe cases -- but really that's what the misconception was about anyway; people who were just below some line but are now just above end up shafted. That actually may be true, the line just isn't the top/bottom of tax brackets, unless of course the top of a tax bracket was used to determine a cutoff.
Oh, I don't know. For starters, it seems that executives that ride a company into the ground do tend to find work elsewhere. But more than that, I'm sure there's somebody out there who would give him an interview for the same reasons he was hired in the first place. I have no idea what those are, since I know little about him in general and nothing about him prior to SCO and the lawsuits, but I presume he did something that people thought was worthy of giving (another?) CEO title to.
As for the SCO part of the resume, he probably CAN spin it. Maybe he can spin it as how long he was able to keep a dead company from rotting away; remember, he's not the only person at SCO who profits from this staying alive. Maybe he claims he was ordered from above to pursue it. Or, hell, just claim it was actually a legal disagreement. Corporate boards deal with enough legal issues that they know things aren't always clear, I don't think any of them would have trouble believing their lawyers' interpretation of something is different than another companies' lawyers, or even what was ultimately ruled.
He might struggle for a little bit (to find new work--he's successfully milked SCO for a metric fuckton of money), but I think "[he] knows he will never get another job as an executive" is optimistic at this point.
As he should. The government shouldn't get a free pass, even on people who actually are guilty. They need to prove their case and do it within the constructs of the laws and protections we've established through the centuries. Likewise, so far as the jury is concerned, it's better for them to err on the side of caution if they have any doubts about the person's guilt.
It's sad that guilty people sometimes go free, but it's much more sad when innocent people are put in jail. Guilty and innocent alike deserve the same protections and representations. If I were a defense attorney, I would not ask any questions that even came close to asking a client if he was actually guilty; I wouldn't want to know.
The most important thing is the process, not the outcome.
I understand the spirit of your proposal and I do support that spirit, but in reality it's not practical.
To show one of many major faults with the plan, please answer this question: Do you have a constitutional right to own a gun? Now discuss it with others on slashdot and see if everybody can agree with you. Ask a federal judge if the US Department of Education is unconstitutional -- and then ask around here.
Not everything later determined to be a violation of the Constitution is malevolent or a power-grab, and not everything determined to be constitutional goes without question. There are legitimate disagreements about what things mean and how far they apply. There are disagreements about what trumps what when there are conflicts of power. (The president is commander and chief and Congress declares war; if no war is declared, can the president send troops off to fight? Put another way, is the War Powers Act constitutional?)
The idea that people should be able to be put in jail for these disagreements--particularly if you're including legislatures (ie, political bodies) to determine who's violated these rules--is silly.
Another major flaw: Who is responsible? Sometimes power-grabs are relatively obvious. What happens if Congress passes an unconstitutional law? Are we sewing prisoner numbers on 268 or more new suits, one for every person who voted for it? Just the people who sponsored it? What if only part of the law was struck down -- who's responsible then? Still 268 people? Whomever wrote that section? Do we need SVN changelogs for congressional bills?
And there are even more, but I think you get the point. This isn't a simple issue, and ultimately the constitution foresaw the potential for corruption and provided a means to fix it. We call them elections. If people continue to re-elect those who pass these laws, or get indicted (can you believe Ted Stevens almost won re-election?!) then we simply deserve the government we get.
The problem is that freedom works both ways. Yes, freedom of speech is a good thing even when it's a corporation and not the government on the other end of the line (I think we can all agree government censorship is bad, so let's leave that part out of the discussion). It's good that people be free to discuss things, even things that may offend others.
But it's equally the right of those people to decide they don't want to hear it. They're free to only associate with those they please by whatever criteria they choose; they're free to set up a club--or in this case a community--with guidelines of their choosing, and to ask people to leave if they decide that their freedom to say whatever they please outweighs everybody else's right to associate only with those they please. Most people consider this to be a perfectly fair trade-off; you have the right to speak, but nobody has to give you a forum to do so.
Personally, I have no problem with pictures of mothers breast feeding. I also have no problem with the creator's of a website determining the rules, even if they use silly criteria I don't agree with. My biggest problem is people like you who always claim to bring the authority of morality to the table. It's not that cut and dried, and even if it were it's only YOUR set of morals. If history has shown us anything, it's that nobody everybody holds the same moral values, and there's not necessarily a right or wrong. A lot of people have died to teach us that lesson.
If you want to protest in hopes that Facebook changes their policies or makes an exception, swell -- but let's not pretend you're morally superior if they ignore you. In the meantime go set up mothersbreastfeedingpics.com and give those people a voice. Freedom for all, that's how it's supposed to be.