I'm sorry but you're just not getting the message. They want you to pay for it each and every time you see it. They want you to have to sit through 10-30 minutes of commercials whether you see it on a TV, your iPad, or at a theater. They want to CONTROL every aspect, particle, atom of how and when it will be viewed and if you infringe on any atom of their control, they want to part you out for organs and tissue and make a profit on your earthly remains.
These are men who have raised avarice and control to art forms, and keep packs of hungry lawyer on tap, just to remind you if you should forget.
Then he should be fired for being an idiot, because the same organics and water that rained down upon the earth rained down everywhere else in the solar system and as long as you have liquid water, and an energy source, there is a fine likelihood there will be life. Which is why we have been and are continuing to look for life on Mars and will be looking for life on the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
See, a person making an argument based on evolution, is someone who understands life and evolution are large, complex, non-isolated events and processes. They call for conjectures like transpermia and the distribution of complex organics, like amino acids from cold molecular clouds and comets being deposits all over the solar system. It is most unlikely that a person of logic standing in a wide open context like evolution, would make a silly, irrational, close minded decision and pursue it with that kind of verve normally associated with an ideologue. Not impossible mind you (you have to have an open mind about these things:-) just highly unlikely.
The only question should be how was he doing his job.
Someone who feels the profound need to nail his beliefs into other peoples' heads usually falls into a subclass of folks who are opinionated, stubborn and won't be dissuaded by silly things like proof or physical reality. A person like that in a technological profession will almost certainly find that this particular set of behaviors is antithetical to doing their job and in a position where logic is the foundation for making valid choices and selections a person who puts their beliefs and personal feeling first is going to step on a lot of toes and be a general aggravation to his coworkers.
There is also a certain air of self righteousness and arrogance. These are highly off-putting character traits. If he feels obliged to share his religious views, he should consider working at a place where people believe the same things. Is there a church in his denomination that needs a person with his job skills. In such an environment of closed minds he should be happy as a pig in a wallow, and the rest of society can avoid the imposition of putting up with his uninvited opinions.
Unfortunately, our form of enterprise rewards virtually one thing only and that one thing is profit. You best believe that if American Corporations can profit from gutting your human rights and stripping you naked in public, you will someday wake up to a chilly morning in your birthday suit. If recent history has taught us nothing, Corporations put the wealth and power of their own boards, ahead of the well being of their shareholders. In such a light, what consideration do your think some distant "Human Right" illicit's? I would guess almost no thought whatsoever, and the recent track record of American Corporations would bear that opinion out.
- Profound access through lobby power, to political representatives
Then sane and substantial restrictions on the rights and freedoms of corporations, as corporations need to created and enforced. The people of which the corporation is composed should be afforded all the rights of any person, but when those individuals have access to the power and rights of the corporation, the expression of rights in service to that corporation must be strictly limited to address the unfair advantage that corporations have over human beings..
The Scalia decision giving corporations unrestrained access to our government has been incredibly damaging to democracy and in fact points use dangerously in the direction of becoming (even more of) a fascist state. There is clearly today as much a need of separation of corporation and state as there is a need to separate church and state.
Melatonin not only aids sleep, but inhibits a number of types of cancer. L-Trytophan is a naturally occurring amino acid found in warm milk and turkey, and it will help you fall into a very nice natural sleep with virtually no ill effects. So why is it, that instead of safe, effective inexpensive solutions to sleeplessness, all we have is poison provided by Big Pharma?
Gawd, I know the running gag here, is that y'all haven't been with wimminz, but there are in fact a few ladies on this site. Mayhaps you would think to inquire rather than shoot off your opinion maker. I realize that geek gurlz are a breed unto themselves, but they have friend and unlike guys, girls actually like to talk about their personal lives (at least as a rule) with other girls.
I think most girls wonder what the big deal is... its like being more interested in the menu than the meal... odd behavior. Yes, brain wiring is different, and I guess that male hunter-gatherer visual thing has made men far more interested in the way things look than the more socially oriented female folk. It also probably points to the very existence of the film genre "Chick Flicks".
As for the chat room thing... I hate to be the one to tell, but the 6 times out of 10, the one girl in the room is a guy posing. I wouldn't be using chat rooms as my measure for female behavior. If the conversation is about instant sexual gratification, you've already left the ladies at the door.
The Appendix is a vestigial organ. It used to do something useful. That said, it's now kind of pointless, however it won't go away. The problem is that its now as small as it can safely get. Any smaller and it becomes a black hole for anything passing through the gut, and boom! Appendicitis. So there is this powerful Darwinian selection factor for it to be small, but not too small, and certainly not gone.
Of course, if women ever get parthenogenesis nailed down, you guys should get really worried. We women would keep the last couple remaining guys in a petting zoo.
To answer your question, right after some tween snorts about 30 of these things on a dare and his heart explodes at the dinner table.
I have mixed feelings about this product, I feel bad that people keep coming up with new ways to get each other addicted for profit. The upside is that this will almost certainly help flush out some of the shallow end of the gene pool. The problem of course is collateral damage. The downside is that I'll have to share the road with the already impatient, attention deficit type A, folks who will now be peaking on a caffeine, adrenaline and nicotine trifecta. Hell, just add poppers to this mix, and we could simply televise our freeways as some kind of reality TV demolition derby on a cultural scale. See! this is a golden argument for nationalized telecommuting!
Actually nuclear has a much better shot. With new designs including pebble bed, silicon carbide fuel elements and helium cooled reactors, and the advent of tiny sealed reactors (everything is in a small sealed package so there's nothing to run out of, nothing to fail critically, a complete self contained reactor.) Nuclear has never looked brighter.
On the other hand, so far nobody has even mentions this thing will be sticking outside of the protection of earth magnetosphere out into the solar wind. Massive currents running through the cable. Incredible forces working to destabilize the cable continuously as the cable reacts to radiation belts and the earth's magnetic field, This thing would be the largest antenna in the solar system. Can you imagine the size of the power discharge at its base when a class X solar flare hits. The mind boggles.
There is no hunting involved here. In fact the best hunting of the day was taking down the drone. This is (to paraphrase Lewis Black) turning a petting zoo into Auschwitz. This is a bunch of overgrown boys who never outgrew their toy guns, and just gotta have a place to shoot something. I guess that's good, otherwise these clowns would be shooting innocent bystanders by accident as they played with their "Weapons". Of course that didn't help Dick Cheney's lawyer buddy, but what the hell, there we're talking about a guy who couldn't hit the right country (Dick, the weapons were in the one with an "n" not the one with a "q"), its no surprise he plugged a lawyer instead of a grouse.
I know the animal activists can be a little annoying, self righteousness just pisses people off. It doesn't change the fact that the idiots with the guns, are in fact idiots with guns. It also points at one of the problems with our society... we give idiots guns. You're 10 times more likely to be shot by an armed idiot you know well, than by a stranger committing a crime. I know some folks get a sense of security being armed. I would argue the facts simply don't support your premise. We either need smarter guns or smarter armed folk. Good luck with all of that.
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people. The world is full of shills and whores who will lie to your face if the price is right. Why should this be a surprise. These guys have a track record. The only thing controversial here is that these reprobates are telling a significant amount of the population exactly what they want to hear. I know its hard, double rough for some, when the lies they tell sound so sweet (consistent with your belief systems...), get over it. These people are not your friends and if China should hire them tomorrow, they'll give you 20 good reasons why eating lead is great for you.
Wake up, that smell is your ass on fire, and these clowns are holding the matches.
I'm sorry but all of this presumes a linear progression of current earth based technology being employed in space. Gamma/X-ray lasers or high energy neutron pulses would be profoundly effective against anything we have today earth-side. Availability of a matter-antimatter device could wipe out entire fleets. Even nukes combined with large rocks (small asteroids) would present a threat in space for which there are no good countermeasures (save another asteroid.)
We aren't even up to really exotic weapons (well matter-antimatter would be pretty exotic.) Nano-weapons, robotic armies, EM pulse weapons, exotic particle weapons, are all highly feasible ways of waging war in space.
Perhaps a more interesting possibility demands discussion. The unilateral cessation of all armed human conflict. As a "price to enter space" any interested nation has to agree to diplomatic solutions to human crisis, and that any attempt to aggressively enter space would result in a messy war filling the near earth region so full of debris, that humanity would be sequestered from all space travel for 5-10 generations. Such an agreement could be established with relative ease, and as the remaining world watched those going into space become strong and wealthy, the impetus to give up childish behavior would be overwhelming.
Me thinks you misapprehend the meaning of personalized... The "personalized" part comes from having unique prescriptions tuned to your specific genetic make-up. The entire process would be automated, and the only personalized part would be a doctor to provide the needed oversight to ensure there were no clerical errors in submitting your DNA to the prescription process.
This would save Doctors unprecedented amounts of time and effort in generating tremendously better diagnoses.This would prevent untold amounts of pain and suffering from unwanted side effects. This would tremendously reduce the chances for malpractice litigation and medical complications due to said side effects. This would allow the poor to have access to high quality, low cost mass medicine. You get scanned at birth, you're monitored from cradle to grave for problems for which you're prone, and the entire society benefits from healthier, happier people.
Of course, there are plenty of distopian possibilities as well... seen GATACA? We just need to make certain that we invent a whole new raft of privacy laws that protect free speech, the freedom of genetic diversity, and right to one's own genome not being used to segregate, subjugate or in any way marginalize a person.
Welcome to the brave new world, if your butt isn't just a little puckered, you're just not paying attention.
The article makes it clear that AMD has suffered a perfect storm of; Lack of leadership, production problems, problems getting optimal integration with ATI and problems surrounding a strategy of using automated chip design vs human engineer optimizing chip design (just from my own personal experience, I've seen human optimization in a massively parallel processing device beat automated software optimization by nearly 3X.)
Intel didn't need to be creepy. This doesn't mean that they weren't. Sometimes a competitor get's under your skin and when you see the chance to squash them like bugs you take the shot. I remember working for Borland in the mid 80s. The Borland CEO just loved poking Bill, and I'm pretty sure that there was no love lost on the M$ side. At some point a limo would pull into the Borland parking lot every couple days over an entire summer. Each time another critical Borland language developer would go out to lunch and never come back. It was discovered that they were being offered ridiculously lucrative opportunities at Microsoft. Over that summer, the entire language development team was simply sucked out of Borland. MS was sued for predatory practices and Borland won the case. Bill opened his wallet, pulled out a hundred million dollars (in other words pocket change) and said "Here... now go away, you're dead!" Businesses are soluble in money. Pour enough on them and they go away.
You know, I'm getting a little sick and tired of all these self obsessed, narcissistic, machiavellian, amoral masses of motile human excrement turning the world into an ontological toilet. We live in a free society, but this lowest common denominator crap is just becoming a simple excuse to be free of social responsibility, dignity, compassion or accountability for one's own actions. True freedom implies taking responsibility for a complex world of interactions where the price of your freedom is responsibility for the freedom of those around you. All take and no give, is the beginning of a free-for-all that ends in a stinking dung heap where a workable society once stood. Maybe its time to teach ethics to our children so perhaps they avoid the stupid mistakes we're making?
Heck with that, what about John Foggerty, he was tricked by the record industry into selling his artistic soul while not yet out of puberty, After quitting CCR, couldn't write a note of music that didn't belong to the record industry for 20 years. AND finally after getting his life back after the 20 years and resumed writing kick ass music was sued in 1993 by Saul Zaentz, who owned CCR’s old label Fantasy Records. Zaentz asserted that Foggerty's new song "Old Man Down The Road" was plagiarized from "Run Through the Jungle." The recording industry sued John Fogertty for plagiarizing John Foggerty. Like raping him for 20 years wasn't enough, they wanted his new stuff too. The jury laughed Zaentz out of court after two hours (about as fast as a jury can make a decision without doing it right there in the jury box.) Foggerty demanded that Zaentz pay the $1.09 million court fees for this legal insult, and Zaentz told him to kiss his southern exposure. The law to that date had been heavily weighted on behalf of the plaintiff (corporations), such that if a plaintiff sues you and you lose you have to pay the attorney's fees, but if you win, they didn't have to pay yours. It took Foggerty over a year and appealing all the way to the Supreme Court to get a decision, that stated indeed if someone sues you, and they lose, they should pay your attorney's fees.
You know, there should just be a legal requirement for truth in advertising that has a permanent message tattooed into the heads of the RIAA and its minions stating "I am here to screw you, everything I ever do is designed to rob you, use you, and leave you buggered and you can tell whenever I'm lying by the fact my mouth is moving." Of course we'd then be forced to tatoo politician with the message "I blow more CEOs by 9:00 AM than a high priced call-girl does in a year." and who's going to pass that law?
In fact about 20% of the human genome is owned and patented by for profit corporations in The U.S. and if you don't think that's lead to some ugly mischief, think again. Try this for example. I declare a patent on a critical set of ocogenes. I make a really good test for those genes so you can get tested for the predisposition of certain common cancers, so you can take necessary precautions that may save your life. Being a for profit business, I decide I'm going to charge $10,000 for my test, and nobody else can make a test because I've patented those genes and any test for them infringes on my patent rights.
There is just so much horror and darkness associated with this specific practice, we need to say no. Nobody should have to power to monetize life and death this way.
As a society we need to start figuring out where the line is between what's good for the stockholder vs. what's good for society. Its great for holders of tabacco stock to make cigarettes as addictive as possible. Not so great for society. Monsanto is systematically wiping out any farm that doesn't grow with its seed. It will take a class action suit against them from thousands of farmers to stop what amounts to predatory practices against innocent farmers whose only crime in most cases is being downwind when Monsanto crops pollinate.
That, or allow Monsanto to destroy all small farms not using their product. I which case, Monsanto share holders do incredibly well, and the country suffers.
I'm sorry but "some farmers" hardly even begins to describe the fact that Monsanto has seen fit to go after farmers whose only crime is being downwind of a field growing their product. All it takes is a little wind blown pollen and cross pollination to product an organic seed harvest that has traces of Monsanto's seed in it. So a small farmer who has no sane way of defending himself against a corporate giant loses his farm because he can't can't protect himself against Monsanto's assault on the small farm.
In fact, if you look closer, Monsanto's intent is to eliminate all farms not using their product. That my friends may be good business, but its grotesque evil on a corporate scale.
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I'm sorry but you're just not getting the message. They want you to pay for it each and every time you see it. They want you to have to sit through 10-30 minutes of commercials whether you see it on a TV, your iPad, or at a theater. They want to CONTROL every aspect, particle, atom of how and when it will be viewed and if you infringe on any atom of their control, they want to part you out for organs and tissue and make a profit on your earthly remains.
These are men who have raised avarice and control to art forms, and keep packs of hungry lawyer on tap, just to remind you if you should forget.
Then he should be fired for being an idiot, because the same organics and water that rained down upon the earth rained down everywhere else in the solar system and as long as you have liquid water, and an energy source, there is a fine likelihood there will be life. Which is why we have been and are continuing to look for life on Mars and will be looking for life on the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
See, a person making an argument based on evolution, is someone who understands life and evolution are large, complex, non-isolated events and processes. They call for conjectures like transpermia and the distribution of complex organics, like amino acids from cold molecular clouds and comets being deposits all over the solar system. It is most unlikely that a person of logic standing in a wide open context like evolution, would make a silly, irrational, close minded decision and pursue it with that kind of verve normally associated with an ideologue. Not impossible mind you (you have to have an open mind about these things :-) just highly unlikely.
The only question should be how was he doing his job.
Someone who feels the profound need to nail his beliefs into other peoples' heads usually falls into a subclass of folks who are opinionated, stubborn and won't be dissuaded by silly things like proof or physical reality. A person like that in a technological profession will almost certainly find that this particular set of behaviors is antithetical to doing their job and in a position where logic is the foundation for making valid choices and selections a person who puts their beliefs and personal feeling first is going to step on a lot of toes and be a general aggravation to his coworkers.
There is also a certain air of self righteousness and arrogance. These are highly off-putting character traits. If he feels obliged to share his religious views, he should consider working at a place where people believe the same things. Is there a church in his denomination that needs a person with his job skills. In such an environment of closed minds he should be happy as a pig in a wallow, and the rest of society can avoid the imposition of putting up with his uninvited opinions.
Unfortunately, our form of enterprise rewards virtually one thing only and that one thing is profit. You best believe that if American Corporations can profit from gutting your human rights and stripping you naked in public, you will someday wake up to a chilly morning in your birthday suit. If recent history has taught us nothing, Corporations put the wealth and power of their own boards, ahead of the well being of their shareholders. In such a light, what consideration do your think some distant "Human Right" illicit's? I would guess almost no thought whatsoever, and the recent track record of American Corporations would bear that opinion out.
I'm sorry, but until the common man has;
Then sane and substantial restrictions on the rights and freedoms of corporations, as corporations need to created and enforced. The people of which the corporation is composed should be afforded all the rights of any person, but when those individuals have access to the power and rights of the corporation, the expression of rights in service to that corporation must be strictly limited to address the unfair advantage that corporations have over human beings..
The Scalia decision giving corporations unrestrained access to our government has been incredibly damaging to democracy and in fact points use dangerously in the direction of becoming (even more of) a fascist state. There is clearly today as much a need of separation of corporation and state as there is a need to separate church and state.
That's President Sanitarium to you sir!!!
Melatonin not only aids sleep, but inhibits a number of types of cancer. L-Trytophan is a naturally occurring amino acid found in warm milk and turkey, and it will help you fall into a very nice natural sleep with virtually no ill effects. So why is it, that instead of safe, effective inexpensive solutions to sleeplessness, all we have is poison provided by Big Pharma?
Oh yeah... profit. Never mind!
Outlaw iron spikes and the only virii that will have iron spikes will be criminals phages!
Gawd, I know the running gag here, is that y'all haven't been with wimminz, but there are in fact a few ladies on this site. Mayhaps you would think to inquire rather than shoot off your opinion maker. I realize that geek gurlz are a breed unto themselves, but they have friend and unlike guys, girls actually like to talk about their personal lives (at least as a rule) with other girls.
I think most girls wonder what the big deal is... its like being more interested in the menu than the meal... odd behavior. Yes, brain wiring is different, and I guess that male hunter-gatherer visual thing has made men far more interested in the way things look than the more socially oriented female folk. It also probably points to the very existence of the film genre "Chick Flicks".
As for the chat room thing... I hate to be the one to tell, but the 6 times out of 10, the one girl in the room is a guy posing. I wouldn't be using chat rooms as my measure for female behavior. If the conversation is about instant sexual gratification, you've already left the ladies at the door.
The Appendix is a vestigial organ. It used to do something useful. That said, it's now kind of pointless, however it won't go away. The problem is that its now as small as it can safely get. Any smaller and it becomes a black hole for anything passing through the gut, and boom! Appendicitis. So there is this powerful Darwinian selection factor for it to be small, but not too small, and certainly not gone.
Of course, if women ever get parthenogenesis nailed down, you guys should get really worried. We women would keep the last couple remaining guys in a petting zoo.
To answer your question, right after some tween snorts about 30 of these things on a dare and his heart explodes at the dinner table.
I have mixed feelings about this product, I feel bad that people keep coming up with new ways to get each other addicted for profit. The upside is that this will almost certainly help flush out some of the shallow end of the gene pool. The problem of course is collateral damage. The downside is that I'll have to share the road with the already impatient, attention deficit type A, folks who will now be peaking on a caffeine, adrenaline and nicotine trifecta. Hell, just add poppers to this mix, and we could simply televise our freeways as some kind of reality TV demolition derby on a cultural scale. See! this is a golden argument for nationalized telecommuting!
Inhaling your food, but this is ridiculous! Garcon, I'd to huff a nice Columbian Supremo, please!
Actually nuclear has a much better shot. With new designs including pebble bed, silicon carbide fuel elements and helium cooled reactors, and the advent of tiny sealed reactors (everything is in a small sealed package so there's nothing to run out of, nothing to fail critically, a complete self contained reactor.) Nuclear has never looked brighter.
On the other hand, so far nobody has even mentions this thing will be sticking outside of the protection of earth magnetosphere out into the solar wind. Massive currents running through the cable. Incredible forces working to destabilize the cable continuously as the cable reacts to radiation belts and the earth's magnetic field, This thing would be the largest antenna in the solar system. Can you imagine the size of the power discharge at its base when a class X solar flare hits. The mind boggles.
There is no hunting involved here. In fact the best hunting of the day was taking down the drone. This is (to paraphrase Lewis Black) turning a petting zoo into Auschwitz. This is a bunch of overgrown boys who never outgrew their toy guns, and just gotta have a place to shoot something. I guess that's good, otherwise these clowns would be shooting innocent bystanders by accident as they played with their "Weapons". Of course that didn't help Dick Cheney's lawyer buddy, but what the hell, there we're talking about a guy who couldn't hit the right country (Dick, the weapons were in the one with an "n" not the one with a "q"), its no surprise he plugged a lawyer instead of a grouse.
I know the animal activists can be a little annoying, self righteousness just pisses people off. It doesn't change the fact that the idiots with the guns, are in fact idiots with guns. It also points at one of the problems with our society... we give idiots guns. You're 10 times more likely to be shot by an armed idiot you know well, than by a stranger committing a crime. I know some folks get a sense of security being armed. I would argue the facts simply don't support your premise. We either need smarter guns or smarter armed folk. Good luck with all of that.
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people. The world is full of shills and whores who will lie to your face if the price is right. Why should this be a surprise. These guys have a track record. The only thing controversial here is that these reprobates are telling a significant amount of the population exactly what they want to hear. I know its hard, double rough for some, when the lies they tell sound so sweet (consistent with your belief systems...), get over it. These people are not your friends and if China should hire them tomorrow, they'll give you 20 good reasons why eating lead is great for you.
Wake up, that smell is your ass on fire, and these clowns are holding the matches.
I'm sorry but all of this presumes a linear progression of current earth based technology being employed in space. Gamma/X-ray lasers or high energy neutron pulses would be profoundly effective against anything we have today earth-side. Availability of a matter-antimatter device could wipe out entire fleets. Even nukes combined with large rocks (small asteroids) would present a threat in space for which there are no good countermeasures (save another asteroid.)
We aren't even up to really exotic weapons (well matter-antimatter would be pretty exotic.) Nano-weapons, robotic armies, EM pulse weapons, exotic particle weapons, are all highly feasible ways of waging war in space.
Perhaps a more interesting possibility demands discussion. The unilateral cessation of all armed human conflict. As a "price to enter space" any interested nation has to agree to diplomatic solutions to human crisis, and that any attempt to aggressively enter space would result in a messy war filling the near earth region so full of debris, that humanity would be sequestered from all space travel for 5-10 generations. Such an agreement could be established with relative ease, and as the remaining world watched those going into space become strong and wealthy, the impetus to give up childish behavior would be overwhelming.
Me thinks you misapprehend the meaning of personalized... The "personalized" part comes from having unique prescriptions tuned to your specific genetic make-up. The entire process would be automated, and the only personalized part would be a doctor to provide the needed oversight to ensure there were no clerical errors in submitting your DNA to the prescription process.
This would save Doctors unprecedented amounts of time and effort in generating tremendously better diagnoses.This would prevent untold amounts of pain and suffering from unwanted side effects. This would tremendously reduce the chances for malpractice litigation and medical complications due to said side effects. This would allow the poor to have access to high quality, low cost mass medicine. You get scanned at birth, you're monitored from cradle to grave for problems for which you're prone, and the entire society benefits from healthier, happier people.
Of course, there are plenty of distopian possibilities as well... seen GATACA? We just need to make certain that we invent a whole new raft of privacy laws that protect free speech, the freedom of genetic diversity, and right to one's own genome not being used to segregate, subjugate or in any way marginalize a person.
Welcome to the brave new world, if your butt isn't just a little puckered, you're just not paying attention.
You're being incredibly presumptuous... this could all be explained by nothing more complicated than cloning or telepathy...
The article makes it clear that AMD has suffered a perfect storm of; Lack of leadership, production problems, problems getting optimal integration with ATI and problems surrounding a strategy of using automated chip design vs human engineer optimizing chip design (just from my own personal experience, I've seen human optimization in a massively parallel processing device beat automated software optimization by nearly 3X.)
Intel didn't need to be creepy. This doesn't mean that they weren't. Sometimes a competitor get's under your skin and when you see the chance to squash them like bugs you take the shot. I remember working for Borland in the mid 80s. The Borland CEO just loved poking Bill, and I'm pretty sure that there was no love lost on the M$ side. At some point a limo would pull into the Borland parking lot every couple days over an entire summer. Each time another critical Borland language developer would go out to lunch and never come back. It was discovered that they were being offered ridiculously lucrative opportunities at Microsoft. Over that summer, the entire language development team was simply sucked out of Borland. MS was sued for predatory practices and Borland won the case. Bill opened his wallet, pulled out a hundred million dollars (in other words pocket change) and said "Here... now go away, you're dead!" Businesses are soluble in money. Pour enough on them and they go away.
You know, I'm getting a little sick and tired of all these self obsessed, narcissistic, machiavellian, amoral masses of motile human excrement turning the world into an ontological toilet. We live in a free society, but this lowest common denominator crap is just becoming a simple excuse to be free of social responsibility, dignity, compassion or accountability for one's own actions. True freedom implies taking responsibility for a complex world of interactions where the price of your freedom is responsibility for the freedom of those around you. All take and no give, is the beginning of a free-for-all that ends in a stinking dung heap where a workable society once stood. Maybe its time to teach ethics to our children so perhaps they avoid the stupid mistakes we're making?
Heck with that, what about John Foggerty, he was tricked by the record industry into selling his artistic soul while not yet out of puberty, After quitting CCR, couldn't write a note of music that didn't belong to the record industry for 20 years. AND finally after getting his life back after the 20 years and resumed writing kick ass music was sued in 1993 by Saul Zaentz, who owned CCR’s old label Fantasy Records. Zaentz asserted that Foggerty's new song "Old Man Down The Road" was plagiarized from "Run Through the Jungle." The recording industry sued John Fogertty for plagiarizing John Foggerty. Like raping him for 20 years wasn't enough, they wanted his new stuff too. The jury laughed Zaentz out of court after two hours (about as fast as a jury can make a decision without doing it right there in the jury box.) Foggerty demanded that Zaentz pay the $1.09 million court fees for this legal insult, and Zaentz told him to kiss his southern exposure. The law to that date had been heavily weighted on behalf of the plaintiff (corporations), such that if a plaintiff sues you and you lose you have to pay the attorney's fees, but if you win, they didn't have to pay yours. It took Foggerty over a year and appealing all the way to the Supreme Court to get a decision, that stated indeed if someone sues you, and they lose, they should pay your attorney's fees.
You know, there should just be a legal requirement for truth in advertising that has a permanent message tattooed into the heads of the RIAA and its minions stating "I am here to screw you, everything I ever do is designed to rob you, use you, and leave you buggered and you can tell whenever I'm lying by the fact my mouth is moving." Of course we'd then be forced to tatoo politician with the message "I blow more CEOs by 9:00 AM than a high priced call-girl does in a year." and who's going to pass that law?
What part of "What mine is mine and what's yours is mine too..." do you not understand???
In fact about 20% of the human genome is owned and patented by for profit corporations in The U.S. and if you don't think that's lead to some ugly mischief, think again. Try this for example. I declare a patent on a critical set of ocogenes. I make a really good test for those genes so you can get tested for the predisposition of certain common cancers, so you can take necessary precautions that may save your life. Being a for profit business, I decide I'm going to charge $10,000 for my test, and nobody else can make a test because I've patented those genes and any test for them infringes on my patent rights.
There is just so much horror and darkness associated with this specific practice, we need to say no. Nobody should have to power to monetize life and death this way.
As a society we need to start figuring out where the line is between what's good for the stockholder vs. what's good for society. Its great for holders of tabacco stock to make cigarettes as addictive as possible. Not so great for society. Monsanto is systematically wiping out any farm that doesn't grow with its seed. It will take a class action suit against them from thousands of farmers to stop what amounts to predatory practices against innocent farmers whose only crime in most cases is being downwind when Monsanto crops pollinate.
That, or allow Monsanto to destroy all small farms not using their product. I which case, Monsanto share holders do incredibly well, and the country suffers.
I'm sorry but "some farmers" hardly even begins to describe the fact that Monsanto has seen fit to go after farmers whose only crime is being downwind of a field growing their product. All it takes is a little wind blown pollen and cross pollination to product an organic seed harvest that has traces of Monsanto's seed in it. So a small farmer who has no sane way of defending himself against a corporate giant loses his farm because he can't can't protect himself against Monsanto's assault on the small farm.
In fact, if you look closer, Monsanto's intent is to eliminate all farms not using their product. That my friends may be good business, but its grotesque evil on a corporate scale.