This is not what happens. Such corporations don't simply "disappear", their assets and personnel persist, and are snapped up at a steep discount by other, similar corporations which haven't collapsed yet. These asset strippers leave the debts: the creditors and the creditor's shareholders have to write them off, creating losses that can wipe them out too.
On the way down, the desperate management strips as much out as they can, in self-awarded bonuses and by running as much of the inbound cashflow through - extracting more money from other corporations so that they are damaged - and constraining outbound. The end result is more collapse and economic suffering, not less.
The alternative to this law-of-the-jungle, Libertarian no-tax, no-fed-money "ideal" is progressive taxation. It's an existing mechanism for inhibiting John Galt from excessive, unwarranted greed, and it can be used to redistribute wealth in a directed fashion. For example, to fund a health care system that provides health care for all. Western civilization would still be a good idea.
Parent comment is not a troll. Someone with mod points doesn't want/. readers to know about the RPF camps where they make people run round a pole for 12 hours a day.
Mike Godwin, General Counsel of Wikipedia is indeed the originator of Godwin's law, which in one form casts the person making the comparison the loser in the argument.
Westerners have lived way beyond their means for way too long [...] The only way out of the mess is the hard way [...] The only thing governments can do for us is get out of the way [...]
These statements (and others in your post) are simply false.
2. Argument by analogy is not proof
In fact, this technique is a well-known fallacy in argument: it is unnecessary when it is valid, and when it's invalid, it's simply wrong. It turns out that most of the time, as in this case, it's just wrong.
3. Use of inflammatory language
Obama Hussein's spending spree [...] you people voted in a muslim socialist as your president
So, I am less generous with your post: I think it is both idiotic and trolling.
Since this is slashdot, the cuts to the stimulus bill that are listed here are only the tech and education related ones. The largest cut made in the Senate was to aid to the States, which lost $40 bn.
The reason for these cuts is that the Republicans have an ideological predisposition to cut taxes, period. These cuts serve primarily to increase the proportion of tax custs in the bill, despite the fact that tax custs do not stimulate the economy as well as direct spending would, because tax cuts mostly benefit people who are in a position to save money.
Why is the stimulus necessary? Because the Congressional Budget Office says that supply of goods and services is going to contract by $2 tn, or 14% of GDP. What the "less government through less taxes" movement is doing is making the already undersized stimulus less effective, significantly increasing the risk of a downward economic spiral. That's my job and your job they're going to take.
The place where Psystar is taking money out of Apple's pocket is in hardware. The difference between "an Apple-branded computer running OS X" and "a Psystar-branded computer running OS X" is the machine itself, not the OS. Therefore, the damage to Apple is the cost of equivalent hardware less the cost of one retail copy of OS X.
Not so: the marginal cost to Apple would be the margin on the hardware sale less the price they charge to Psystar of OS X. The marginal cost of production of the software is effectively zero, and the lost benefit to Apple and its shareholders is neither the price (to the consumer) nor the (production) cost of the hardware, but the difference between the two.
Let's cut taxes and reduce spending elsewhere, too!
Smaller government FTW.
Grover, is that you?
I do not understand why slashdot collectively has not laid this Libertarian nonsense to rest. Smaller government is not the answer to the problems facing the US: smarter government is.
There are three actions that a government which controls the money supply can take to reduce the burden of debt:
1. Stop taking on more debt.
2. Have more income than expenditure (including debt service costs).
3. Print money.
The present Administration is betting heavily on (3), which is inflationary, by definition. This reduces the value of the debt - but also destroys the value of any savings that we might have.
Increasing taxation increases the state's income, making it possible to eliminate the need for new debt and even pay down existing debt, and is not inflationary.
As a matter of social justice, the people who should pay for the effort to keep the nation afloat should be the bandits who worked so hard to sink it.
Until Obama and other Democratic congress critters gave in to the Bush Administration and telco lobbying this summer, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) outlawed wiretaps without a warrant, and had done for over 30 years. The rules were well-known to the telcos and their attorneys.
Several telcos were asked to break the law by the Bush Administration; one, Qwest, responded by asking for documentation that the request was constitutional. It was not provided, and they did not tap. They were also excluded from certain lucrative federal contracts.
Consider the AT&T Fulsom Street tap: all traffic passing through AT&T's Fulsom Street, SFO CO passed through a splitter into a room controlled by the Feds. Consider that an individual unwarranted wiretap has a $1500 penalty, and multiply that by the number of customers whose traffic they carry in a day.
Why do you think the telcos lobbied for immunity?
Why are they paying for the Democratic convention in Denver?
As I write, the grandparent of this post scores 4, and the parent 2. The parent of this post is unquestionably informative: it appropriately corrects the record for any/. readers who voted for Bush over Gore because of the negative spinnage from 2000 - which we still see 8 years later in this post's grandparent.
For which, God help us all. Mod parent up, please.
Telcos almost universally lease that space from power companies [...] There are some rare cases where the telco owns the poles or right of way, but they are very rare. Long haul runs are often, if not almost always, done using leased space from owners of train lines.
Not entirely correct.
SPRINT = Southern Pacific Railroad Information NeTwork. Used rights of way along the railway network. MCI = Microwave Communications, Inc. Used Microwave for its backbone. Now part of Verizon. WilTel = Williams Telecommunications. Ran fiber through decomissioned gas (not gasoline) lines. They've done this twice that I know of: one network was sold to MCI, another to Level 3.
These rights of way have been provisioned to carry enormous amounts of traffic.
Kurt Vonnegut's martian soldiers in Sirens of Titan got their oxygen from Tang mixed with hydrogen peroxide.
Rented a tent! Rented a tent! Rented a tent, a tent, a tent!
EMI (and other *AA members) have done very well selling us circular media over the years, and we object to paying the same price for entertainment without the round objects. We've been paying for manufactured circles since the piano roll, and it's time to stop.
Although the..AA and networks have fought to centralise control of media distribution, the solution to the problem of our desire for content and the bandwidth to distribute it in a decentralised model. This is why P2P matters, and why it's regarded as a threat by the true copyright pirates - whose previous business was selling circles, not music or images.
The only person whose time I manage is me. I want to get invitations to brown bag tech sessions, and if the schedule changes I want them to be updated in an email I only have to read. I don't want to go off-task to revise my calendar. I want pop-up reminders for the dentist, picking my son up from school, and work deadlines. I want to create meetings with an e-mail and find out who can attend, and then who's going to.
The Calendar, as a Diary, with public features so you can schedule around other people, is a key application. It should be obvious that the need for a desktop calendar integrated with email exists for more than just "Goddamn managers".
Now is the time to curb the excesses of the present Administration: idealism paired with action is still powerful. We have an election coming: do what you can, volunteer, vote, debate, go to meetings. You have a phone: call the phone company, join the class action suit. You have a senator: call their office. We have a Bill of Rights: defend it, and let people who swore to defend it that you expect them to keep their word.
Or roll over and take it where it hurts. No more "politicians are all corrupt weasels, so that's OK". They only get to be corrupt weasels when we let them.
The business of an architectural practice is producing Contract Documents, which must be kept for years: specifications, drawings, instructions, and correspondence with contractors and consultants.
You must have a long-term strategy for document preservation. You must also make sure that you can still retrieve and view these documents up to the end of the life of the practice's liability for a particular project: that means keeping hardware, operating systems and applications software available so that the contract documents can be reviewed at any time until the liability is over.
This is not an option. The long term survival of the business can depend on this.
No, it isn't. If it were, it would be; and it hasn't been, and isn't now. The natural state of affairs is exactly what we have, which includes a few people who enjoy what they call freedom - often at the expense of the many.
Rising standards of living solve most of the pressing problems facing the world today
No they don't. In particular, it doesn't solve the finite resource problem which stands directly in the way of this "ten billion millionaires" pipedream.
Wealthy/Free nations don't tend to make war on each other
Except that they do, time and again. They have civil wars, world wars, and armed territorial confrontations. There are trade wars, fish wars, and little islands invaded in the Carribean, South Atlantic, and Mediterranean. Though perhaps, perhaps - warring is a disqualification for freedom. Is that right? Are there any free countries at all, or are you the only one?
Wealthy nations don't tend to produce terrorists either
Apart from the IRA, Bader-Meinhof, RAF, the Weathermen and the SLA, to name a few from recent history; and then there's the terrorists produced in nations oppressed and exploited by the "free/wealthy nations". Look at the Libertarian theme park Iraq has become: are not the followers of Moqtada Al Sadr free now Hussein is gone, and free to organise themselves into a militia, bear arms and shoot their liberators and fellow citizens? Whoopee!
Finally, you claim you have a clue, and imply the article's submitter does not. Your clue is, apparently, that freedom solves all ills - including air pollution. Which it does not. It's taken environmental regulation inspired by (obviously clueless) bleeding-heart tree-hugging liberals, like those that protected the spotted owl, to reduce SO2 production in the US: the utopian ideal of freedom you present (glancingly here, more directly in your other posts) has no room for this... restraint! On Free Choice!
No one would survive your model of freedom and prosperity producing world peace, because there'd be no-one to make your clothes, build your housing, make your domestic appliances, or grow your food, because prosperous people with your particular clue just don't do that kind of work, do you?
Believe it or not, more solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface than ours. The albedo (i.e. reflectivity) of Venus is so high...
Paul, are you a Venusian? If so, your.sig ("abandon all hope, ye who enter here") had better be posted some way up in orbit in case you're expecting any of us to drop by...
The mail server was also having trouble (you could connect but there was no signon or response to HELO), and now responds "Connect failed". The FTP server went down early this morning. There is the report of the Intranet being down as well.
Nice find on the web site. Once they sort out a couple of other wrinkles, they can get the FUD machine pumping again...
This thought has run through several minds: that once is a misfortune, twice carelessness; but three times looks like gross negligence.
As one of the contributors to the article in question, I feel bound to offer some corrections to this argument. Employees of SCO and Caldera did not "give away the code" under the direction of their supervisors: they collaborated with the Linux development community, which includes people from IBM, in an effort to integrate SMP, JFS, NUMA and RCU in the kernel in order to produce an Enterprise class Linux.
The evidence that SCO was broadly aware of this work lies in the SCO Linux 4 ("powered by UnitedLinux") marketing materials.
There is an interview from August last year where Darl McBride not only says that SCO Linux would be "certified enterprise-ready by IBM", he also says that he understood what Open Source was in 1994, when he was first shown Linux.
I do not believe that Darl McBride can continue to pretend that he (i) didn't know what the GPL was about, or (ii) that he didn't know that Linux was going to the Enterprise.
Slashdot Mirror
On the way down, the desperate management strips as much out as they can, in self-awarded bonuses and by running as much of the inbound cashflow through - extracting more money from other corporations so that they are damaged - and constraining outbound. The end result is more collapse and economic suffering, not less.
The alternative to this law-of-the-jungle, Libertarian no-tax, no-fed-money "ideal" is progressive taxation. It's an existing mechanism for inhibiting John Galt from excessive, unwarranted greed, and it can be used to redistribute wealth in a directed fashion. For example, to fund a health care system that provides health care for all. Western civilization would still be a good idea.
Parent comment is not a troll. Someone with mod points doesn't want /. readers to know about the RPF camps where they make people run round a pole for 12 hours a day.
CoS and Miscavige are FAIL. Over and over again.
(Mod points yesterday, none today..!)
1. Your position lacks factual foundation
In fact, it's worse than that:
These statements (and others in your post) are simply false.
2. Argument by analogy is not proof
In fact, this technique is a well-known fallacy in argument: it is unnecessary when it is valid, and when it's invalid, it's simply wrong. It turns out that most of the time, as in this case, it's just wrong.
3. Use of inflammatory language
So, I am less generous with your post: I think it is both idiotic and trolling.
HAND.
The reason for these cuts is that the Republicans have an ideological predisposition to cut taxes, period. These cuts serve primarily to increase the proportion of tax custs in the bill, despite the fact that tax custs do not stimulate the economy as well as direct spending would, because tax cuts mostly benefit people who are in a position to save money.
Why is the stimulus necessary? Because the Congressional Budget Office says that supply of goods and services is going to contract by $2 tn, or 14% of GDP. What the "less government through less taxes" movement is doing is making the already undersized stimulus less effective, significantly increasing the risk of a downward economic spiral. That's my job and your job they're going to take.
Not so: the marginal cost to Apple would be the margin on the hardware sale less the price they charge to Psystar of OS X. The marginal cost of production of the software is effectively zero, and the lost benefit to Apple and its shareholders is neither the price (to the consumer) nor the (production) cost of the hardware, but the difference between the two.
Let's cut taxes and reduce spending elsewhere, too!
Smaller government FTW.
Grover, is that you?
I do not understand why slashdot collectively has not laid this Libertarian nonsense to rest. Smaller government is not the answer to the problems facing the US: smarter government is.
There are three actions that a government which controls the money supply can take to reduce the burden of debt:
1. Stop taking on more debt.
2. Have more income than expenditure (including debt service costs).
3. Print money.
The present Administration is betting heavily on (3), which is inflationary, by definition. This reduces the value of the debt - but also destroys the value of any savings that we might have.
Increasing taxation increases the state's income, making it possible to eliminate the need for new debt and even pay down existing debt, and is not inflationary.
As a matter of social justice, the people who should pay for the effort to keep the nation afloat should be the bandits who worked so hard to sink it.
Until Obama and other Democratic congress critters gave in to the Bush Administration and telco lobbying this summer, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) outlawed wiretaps without a warrant, and had done for over 30 years. The rules were well-known to the telcos and their attorneys.
Several telcos were asked to break the law by the Bush Administration; one, Qwest, responded by asking for documentation that the request was constitutional. It was not provided, and they did not tap. They were also excluded from certain lucrative federal contracts.
Consider the AT&T Fulsom Street tap: all traffic passing through AT&T's Fulsom Street, SFO CO passed through a splitter into a room controlled by the Feds. Consider that an individual unwarranted wiretap has a $1500 penalty, and multiply that by the number of customers whose traffic they carry in a day.
Why do you think the telcos lobbied for immunity?
Why are they paying for the Democratic convention in Denver?
As I write, the grandparent of this post scores 4, and the parent 2. The parent of this post is unquestionably informative: it appropriately corrects the record for any /. readers who voted for Bush over Gore because of the negative spinnage from 2000 - which we still see 8 years later in this post's grandparent.
For which, God help us all. Mod parent up, please.
The problem is how to use the same "free" radio frequency (2.4 GHz) both for "b/g" and "n" without interferencing
* SLAP *
Seconded.
Telcos almost universally lease that space from power companies [...] There are some rare cases where the telco owns the poles or right of way, but they are very rare. Long haul runs are often, if not almost always, done using leased space from owners of train lines.
Not entirely correct.
SPRINT = Southern Pacific Railroad Information NeTwork. Used rights of way along the railway network.
MCI = Microwave Communications, Inc. Used Microwave for its backbone. Now part of Verizon.
WilTel = Williams Telecommunications. Ran fiber through decomissioned gas (not gasoline) lines. They've done this twice that I know of: one network was sold to MCI, another to Level 3.
These rights of way have been provisioned to carry enormous amounts of traffic.
Kurt Vonnegut's martian soldiers in Sirens of Titan got their oxygen from Tang mixed with hydrogen peroxide. Rented a tent! Rented a tent! Rented a tent, a tent, a tent!
HTH
EMI (and other *AA members) have done very well selling us circular media over the years, and we object to paying the same price for entertainment without the round objects. We've been paying for manufactured circles since the piano roll, and it's time to stop.
Although the ..AA and networks have fought to centralise control of media distribution, the solution to the problem of our desire for content and the bandwidth to distribute it in a decentralised model. This is why P2P matters, and why it's regarded as a threat by the true copyright pirates - whose previous business was selling circles, not music or images.
The only person whose time I manage is me. I want to get invitations to brown bag tech sessions, and if the schedule changes I want them to be updated in an email I only have to read. I don't want to go off-task to revise my calendar. I want pop-up reminders for the dentist, picking my son up from school, and work deadlines. I want to create meetings with an e-mail and find out who can attend, and then who's going to.
The Calendar, as a Diary, with public features so you can schedule around other people, is a key application. It should be obvious that the need for a desktop calendar integrated with email exists for more than just "Goddamn managers".
What, if you please, prevents a person who gets into a position where they can get things done from being allowed to "actually have facts"?
If this were true, then there'd be no point in anyone learning anything with a view to making informed decisions.
Your argument is absurd. Your own statements of "fact" are underresearched if not outright false ("all the scientists"). Please think again.
You're a dreamer...
But you're not the only one.
Now is the time to curb the excesses of the present Administration: idealism paired with action is still powerful. We have an election coming: do what you can, volunteer, vote, debate, go to meetings. You have a phone: call the phone company, join the class action suit. You have a senator: call their office. We have a Bill of Rights: defend it, and let people who swore to defend it that you expect them to keep their word.
Or roll over and take it where it hurts. No more "politicians are all corrupt weasels, so that's OK". They only get to be corrupt weasels when we let them.
You must have a long-term strategy for document preservation. You must also make sure that you can still retrieve and view these documents up to the end of the life of the practice's liability for a particular project: that means keeping hardware, operating systems and applications software available so that the contract documents can be reviewed at any time until the liability is over.
This is not an option. The long term survival of the business can depend on this.
No, it isn't. If it were, it would be; and it hasn't been, and isn't now. The natural state of affairs is exactly what we have, which includes a few people who enjoy what they call freedom - often at the expense of the many.
No they don't. In particular, it doesn't solve the finite resource problem which stands directly in the way of this "ten billion millionaires" pipedream.
Except that they do, time and again. They have civil wars, world wars, and armed territorial confrontations. There are trade wars, fish wars, and little islands invaded in the Carribean, South Atlantic, and Mediterranean. Though perhaps, perhaps - warring is a disqualification for freedom. Is that right? Are there any free countries at all, or are you the only one?
Apart from the IRA, Bader-Meinhof, RAF, the Weathermen and the SLA, to name a few from recent history; and then there's the terrorists produced in nations oppressed and exploited by the "free/wealthy nations". Look at the Libertarian theme park Iraq has become: are not the followers of Moqtada Al Sadr free now Hussein is gone, and free to organise themselves into a militia, bear arms and shoot their liberators and fellow citizens? Whoopee!
Finally, you claim you have a clue, and imply the article's submitter does not. Your clue is, apparently, that freedom solves all ills - including air pollution. Which it does not. It's taken environmental regulation inspired by (obviously clueless) bleeding-heart tree-hugging liberals, like those that protected the spotted owl, to reduce SO2 production in the US: the utopian ideal of freedom you present (glancingly here, more directly in your other posts) has no room for this... restraint! On Free Choice!
No one would survive your model of freedom and prosperity producing world peace, because there'd be no-one to make your clothes, build your housing, make your domestic appliances, or grow your food, because prosperous people with your particular clue just don't do that kind of work, do you?
Paul, are you a Venusian? If so, your .sig ("abandon all hope, ye who enter here") had better be posted some way up in orbit in case you're expecting any of us to drop by...
And China.
And India.
And Germany.
It won't just be jobs that disappear from the US: it'll be business, trade, and a lot of skilled people.
If the lobby succeeds, it will show just how bad and shortsighted the political system in this country has become.
It's back to FTP!
The mail server was also having trouble (you could connect but there was no signon or response to HELO), and now responds "Connect failed". The FTP server went down early this morning. There is the report of the Intranet being down as well.
Nice find on the web site. Once they sort out a couple of other wrinkles, they can get the FUD machine pumping again...
This thought has run through several minds: that once is a misfortune, twice carelessness; but three times looks like gross negligence.
The evidence that SCO was broadly aware of this work lies in the SCO Linux 4 ("powered by UnitedLinux") marketing materials.
There is an interview from August last year where Darl McBride not only says that SCO Linux would be "certified enterprise-ready by IBM", he also says that he understood what Open Source was in 1994, when he was first shown Linux.
I do not believe that Darl McBride can continue to pretend that he (i) didn't know what the GPL was about, or (ii) that he didn't know that Linux was going to the Enterprise.