The RIAA wanted this service to go down first, because it was morally legal, and compliant with the intent, if not the letter, of the law.
Why did they want it? Because it kills the only way electronic distribution could work under current law, and preserves their monopoly. This monopoly is based on the fact that you have to buy a physical product to get the information. If you could skip that step, you could easily lose the record companies (to the betterment of music) as all their other services are based upon this. Remember, they don't on the music, just the RECORDINGS, so they have to make sure the recording is the only way you can listen to it aside from live performances.
If the recordings become licensable information rather than a physical product, then logically ASCAP and BMI are better suited to handle renumeration, as they deal in this sort of easily-copied information. Then where does Johnny Notalent get his revenge for having a tin ear? "Record Producer" and being able to trade sex for recording contracts sounds so much better than "BMI accountant"...
Re:Yadda, yadda, yadda...
on
Mac Rants
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While even on a measily PII 233MHz you can play MP3s in the background with Winamp with no skipping or noticable performence hit
BS. I have a Win2K system 750/128 at work and it skips at EVERY FRIGGIN' IO while playing MP3s. By comparison, my 400 MHz G3 Power Computing clone Mac at home (with a truly crawling bus speed, 60MHz) does not skip, even when using that resource hog, iTunes. DOES NOT SKIP.
Sounds like you got a crappy iMac. Most used ones are. The ones that work tend to stay at work. We've had two at work for testing and both had major hardware problems. Used PCs are just fine, except they can't run current software because they're too slow. Used Macs, unless you buy them from a graphic design shop that's upgrading, are being dumped because someone forgot to return them within the warranty period.
nations that have missiles aren't likely to use them anymore than Russia is
But they are equally likely to threaten to use them, just as Russia has and, yes, does (as does China).
People who give the "suitcase bomb" argument just don't understand the politics of nuclear weapons. It takes the resources of a nation-state to make them, and at that point, they don't want it wasted on terrorism when they can suddenly make the leap to The Club, and gain the respect that Russia got. Do you think that anyone would pay attention to Russia right now if they didn't have nukes? They are a bananna republic with bombs (yes, I've been there, yes, I speak the language). So a power would indeed threaten to use them--and if the U.S. only lost one city, do you think that world opinion would support the genocide of an entire nation in response? What did the women and children of that country do to merit death, especially when we have not been totally destroyed?
And what U.S. politician would, absent a missile defense, be willing to call the bluff of someone who could remove a million or more voters? The U.S. was nearly paralyzed by the thought of biological weapons in Iraq--had they a demonstrated working nuke, public opinion would have never supported intervention.
By your logic, China can't threaten us now, so nothing changes for them. Russia can overwhelm the system easily. So what changes except for wannabe states? You'd think some people are just wanting to die in a nuclear blast.
no one is going to buy slower hardware to run a slower OS just because they want to "think different."
Gee, isn't that what PC users did until 2000? Oh, wait, they bought slower hardware to run a slower OS to "think conformity." I see the difference, now.
Seriously, there's no inherent reason why the PowerPC line can't eventually catch up (and MHz/MHz, it's still faster for most tasks), and OS X is at the beginning of its optimization cycle. NT is at the end of its cycle, and who knows if Intel can maintain the lead?
Even if Apple ported to x86-compatible architecture (think Athlon), it would probably use a subset and a different motherboard architecture so you couldn't run it on some POC Korean or homebuilt PC. Even the Dell I type this on has big problems running Win2K because PCs just have massive quality control problems in any given configuration. Apple's stuff "just works" because they integrate the hardware with itself and the OS.
...but only under certain tests, which this did not meet. Interesting to note that this had Ginsberg and Clarence "Oh my god he's so conservative he'll kill us all" Thomas in the majority together.
This wasn't a "liberals +1" vote, people. That's what's sad...liberals used to be able to be counted on for such things but now I can't even trust them to guard us against the police.
Don't underestimate the power of the mind. It's a well-documented fact that, for instance, people will report feeling hot more often and estimate the temperature in the room to be much higher if accompanied by someone complaining that "it's hot in here!"
Pain is notoriously subjective, and while tendonitis is a real condition, many people who have heard of the problem and have an unhappy workplace might focus their feelings of dissatisfaction on their hands and wrists even if they don't have tendonitis. I know mine are twinging more as I write this because I'm thinking about it.
So to say that sometimes disease sufferers are suffering from a psychosomatic rather than a physical condition does not suggest that the disease doesn't exist or that people who report problems are "faking it." Psychosomatic most emphatically does NOT suggest it's being faked (i.e. someone who is pain free is reporting pain to gain sympathy in a court trial) but that its origin is in the mind.
Mass hysteria is a fascinating subject--witness the fainting spells that would communicate through suggestion in Vienna during Freud's time. Witness the waking dreams accredited to UFO abduction now versus demonic possession in the 1600s versus not at all in Japan. Suggestibility is also a fascinating subject: it is notoriously easy to suggest an alternate version of events to an eyewitness and get them to swear that something happened that didn't happen ("Now, did the man with the green sweater cross the street in front of or behind the car wreck?" when in fact there was no man in a green sweater).
So someone who studies these phenomena is not, ipso facto, out to prove they don't exist.
The bigger weakness is, how long do you think that cellular network is going to continue working once the USAF finds out it is vectoring in the interceptors?
Right...they already used some sophisticated anti-power-grid weapons in the war with Iraq. You could take out receivers simply by flying a few really strong transmitters at cell freuqencies on drones. And if they really want to get nasty, one good FOBS nuke will shut down the cellular networks but good through the EMP effect.
Seriously, this is the same as I've seen for every Pentium I've installed SETI on...a PII 300, PIII ~600, and a PIII 750. The PIII 750 is the first one to actually get in the ballpark of a G3 400. Now, the G4 500 was still blowing them out of the water... 6 hours or so.
Not only is he expert at the same sort of crap that generates "Bible Codes" (does Wheat realize that he's the intellectual equivalent of a Pax Channel special or a Fox conspiracy-theory special?) but he's spectacularly bad at the one thing an English major should be good at: getting the INTENDED, OBVIOUS point of the damn story.
To wit: he expends all his energy on Bowman and The Odyssey and Zarathustra with an emphasis on telling the Human story of both "We are What We Make of Ourselves". The whole point of 2001 is that We Might Be Overestimating Our Place in the Universe, and We Wouldn't Even Understand Something Truly Advanced, but They Might Understand Us Better than We Ourselves. Wheat never addresses this theme in his comments, which leads me to think that his exercise in numerology misses the point as well. Surely there was at least one or two symbols present along that theme...maybe the impenetrable blackness of a certain monolith, representing the unknown?
Once again, Lit Crit types prove themselves to be staggeringly less elite and enlightened than they'd like us to believe.
When you have a small business it isn't terribly difficult to make sure you're selling things for more than they cost you
Maybe it's easy to take a look at the bottom line to make sure your net inflow was greater than your net outflow, but figuring that price ahead of time is no piece of cake.
First, you may pay something for an item, but don't forget there are a bunch of other costs involved. Rent, taxes, licenses, salaries, benefits, capital costs (a cash register costs something), business services, tax prep, legal costs, repair bills, utilities, insurance, costs, etc., etc., etc.
Now, a major corporation generally has major league accountants well versed in standard and acceptable (to VCs and institutional investors) accounting practices. A business usually has Quickbooks on an old PC and someone (if they are lucky) with an associate's degree in accounting.
Now, all you have to do is put that PC, the software, and Quickbooks together and try to figure out a price that will move enough merchandise at a low price or less merchandise at a higher price to keep up with those (usually variable) expenses (not to mention your competition, who may be a huge corporation), oh, and make sure it happens so that you always have cash on hand to pay your bills when they're due.
That may not be rocket science, but it ain't *easy*.
Only one organization has a publicly and legally recognized obligation in this arena, and that's a government.
Yes, and let's see: the American government has more legal obligations in this area than the UK government, since it has a bill of rights in a written constitution. So it ought to be the ideal, right?
- McCarthy
- Internment of Japanese
- Firebombing of civilians
- Bombing of MOVE
- Tuskeegee medical experiments
- releases of radioactive material on domestic populations
- Watergate
- Echelon
- Clinton bombing Iraq when he needed a distraction
- Bush--ditto
These are just a few. But basically only governments that lose wars have their officials jailed or otherwise punished. I fail to see your faith in it.
The Indian Government owned 51% of the Bhopal plant. What, were they going to sue themselves?
The citizens of India voted for their government, who had final oversite of the plant, and their government condemned them to death. Union Carbide may have some responsibility, but the solution most people are suggesting (government regulation) failed despite being much more intense than is allowed in the US generally (have any of your workplaces been owned 51% by the government lately? thought not).
As for SUVs, government regulations allow them to be less safe than cars and people still buy them. Who is turning a blind eye?
Corporations being a person is a strange concept, but please, lets find some examples where they're actually at fault instead of greedy, heedless consumers and corrupt governments.
Re:The economic argument is pure sophistry.
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Mundie Responds
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But you're admitting the Apache binary has value, an "intrinsic" value in its ability to execute.
The source code is analogous to the pattern of the shirt. Yet in the parent comment, you claim it has no value, except "indirect" in its value to allow businesses to do other things more efficiently (though how they are going to serve web pages without a web server program is beyond me--perhaps it's HTTP over pigeons?). I'm glad you retract this claim.
OK. Now to replicating clothing. To replicate is to make a copy. In the case of software binaries, this is making a DIFFERENT part of the disk have magnetic states in the same pattern as the parent part. The manual labor part of this is pretty limited: type "cp apache/usr/local/newapache/". Oh, wait, you need between $1500 to $3000 worth of equipment to make it that easy. Fortunately, 50% of America has equipment that could be put to that use. You need to have a fair amount of expertise to do anything with it, which takes a fair amount of time and effort to acquire.
Now: you have a coat. It consists of some materials arranged in a pattern. If you purchase the same materials and use a sewing machine, you can reproduce it in a few hours. You need no skills to use it afterwards. If you take into account the cost of the labor, tools and materials for each, the coat is far cheaper to replicate.
It's not easier for you, because you've grown up in the.0000000000000001 percent of human history for which both ready-made clothes and computers were widespread in certain extremely wealthy parts of the world. So you couldn't sew a button, let alone a coat.
Will you, with your previous investments, be able to replicate more copies of apache in less time than a coatmaker? Sure. But the end result is changing the pattern of physical materials, and both take less effort for the average person than, say, replicating a Saturn V.
You confuse the design (the code) with the material (the disk bits with the pattern on it). Similarly, the sentences are not identical to the ideas they express. Therefore if I state you're not an economics major and never were, I've written a well-formed sentence that expresses a true idea. Therefore if I state you're not an economics major, I've written a well-formed statement that expresses a true idea. Bango--two sentences, with one common pattern--a single, true idea.
But the point I was getting at is that both have value in the context of the economy. One is not valueless. Both have values that are indirect. The coat is valuable because it keeps you warm...but that in and of itself, economically speaking, is only of value if keeping you warm allows you to do other things, because no one will yet pay you to keep warm (well, maybe in Sweden).
Re:The economic argument is pure sophistry.
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Mundie Responds
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Geez, even Keynes had better economics than this:
"There is no intrinsic value in the actual ones and zeros which are replicated trivially and at low cost."
Really? I can put a 1, then a million 0's, and then a 1, and you can replicate it trivially and at low cost, but I don't think it has as much value as, say an Apache binary.
"What drives the economy is real production of goods: think food, clothing, energy, transportation etc....The value provided by software is related to *executing* the software."
Wow. There's no intrinsic value in a jacket lying on the floor. It's only when you *put it on* that it gains any value. So, by your own argument, clothing manufacturers, by putting out clothing that is "easily replicated and at low cost" (don't forget, just because you've paid for a computer with hard drive space instead of a loom and a few bags of fiber, doesn't mean that the cost of the infrastructure you have plus the skilled labor to make the duplication isn't real in either case), are just "weaving money".
Because the economy functions as a system, rather than as a tangible object, no one part has "intrinsic value". In fact, that's the whole lynchpin of the Open Source/Free Software argument: the services Open Source programmers provide are more valuable for being part of an entire, sharing community of coders. So much so, that it's more valuable than if they tried to not share their code and keep "innovations" to themselves to the point that other coders would also refuse to share "innovations". So much so, that they should be paid by companies to work on this stuff full time (unless you plan to do piecework in the clothing factory by day to fund your Open Source programming at night to enable the servers that power the factory's front office's billing system).
My sense of wonder is enhanced by understanding, not undermined. Perhaps it's a failing of those who would rather substitute stereotypes for characterization, bromides for solutions, vilification for criticism, and ignorance for a sense of wonder.
Science, to steal from Carl Sagan, is a candle in the dark. And the dark is only more interesting than the light if you have the unbearable hubris to believe that your puny imagination is more interesting than the awesome complexity that is reality.
The buildings probably look that way from the washing out of the process--there was heavy photoshop "interpretation" of what the color balance should have been. The truth is that wood and coal stoves were used quite often then, and they made things look just as grimy and ugly. However, being a more thinly-populated and economically depressed era/region, there weren't as many of them.
It's fine to be an environmentalist--I am--but that doesn't mean you have to give up technology or economic progress. Taking our current population back to the technologies of the time would result in more, not less pollution.
The mantra, as always, should be "fission now to power our way to fusion later."
Replace every reference to "corporation" in your rant with "government" and it holds just as true.
Remember that the government of China refuses to institute a minimum wage (and in fact is the foreign company, lots of shoes are made in Chinese Army factories).
Everything you mention a corporation doing, governments have done 500 times worse. It wasn't a corporation that murdered 6 million Jews or dropped an atomic bomb on anyone.
Also, the previous poster did not say the aim was to "make money above all else", he just said "to make money." If you believe that making money is not one of your aims in your own life, you need to learn the art of introspection.
> Because they would just hire the Pinkertons, who would show up and kill the rioters.
Killing rioters is, except in rare cases of self defense, illegal. Killing peaceful demonstrators is never legal. Arresting them both if they break laws is perfectly legal and should be encouraged.
While I don't share the desire to privatize police, the point I think the original poster was trying to make is that government has a monopoly on the legal initiation of the use of force, which is why libertarians (small l) are much more against their data collection than that of corporations. Corporations also historically have a better behavior controller than governments: if they do something sufficiently heinous, people don't buy their products (except in the case of monopolies, which is why I support antitrust law).
Government, however, is a monopoly, and can legally do whatever it takes to make you obey the law, up to and including killing you if you don't (in the US, Japan, South Africa, and, until recently, Belgium--and elsewhere, too, if you count the fact that all countries allow the police to kill under certain circumstances). If the government isn't strictly limited, it can make you do whatever it wants and you don't have a realistic recourse--certainly nothing as easy as switching brands of washing powder.
Corporations cannot force you to give over information without your consent--usually they tie this to some product you want to entice you, but that's different from forcing. Sure, you "have" to have that MP3 ripper for free instead of using the paid version, but they require that information from you!! waaaaaaaa, I wanna pwayah for fwee, waaaaaaa, wifout givin' away no nassy infomation, waaaaaaa.
Really? Why did PG&E's workers have a higher-than-average life expectancy and no "cluster" of cases, then? Why wasn't chromium-6 found in groundwater in all the areas of the "cluster"? I said there were "releases", but in several places there were in fact no groundwater contaminants found.
Gee when the New York Times is called "right wing", it's a lefty crowd.
Wow, those who don't pay attention in logic class are doomed to make ASPs of themselves in public.
"You are an ignorant troll," whether preceded by "I believe" or not is an opinion, a statement of value or belief, not fact. It can be proven neither true nor untrue.
True statements making a claim about non-subjective reality are facts. Untrue statements are just claims.
What amazes me is how the "fact" accepted with blind faith by so many lefties (and increasingly righties, thanks to Pat Buchanan and Gore Vidal becoming busom buddies, revealing that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the twin thugs of politics, Left and Right) that corporations are able to effortlessly control public opinion is never contrasted with the identical efforts of ideological organizations and government.
Environmental Defense also has "grassroots" organizations organized from the top down. The government also holds press releases with scientists that are forced, on pain of losing grant money, to side with the Administration's position. They frequently abuse the objective reality you mention in favor of predetermined conclusions (cf. Erin Brockovich, where no chemicals were in fact found in the water supply, but because there were "releases" and a "possibility", lots of people lost their jobs to make a bunch of slimy lawyers rich).
Yet a blind faith that government and non-profit institutions are going to protect your (equally socially constructed) "right" to gather in communities suffuses the entire piece. If Environmental Defense doesn't like what you say, be sure you're going to feel the onslaught of a PR machine not inhibited by the sensitivity to not POing customers that corporations have. If the government doesn't like what you say, they won't waste time with PR. How much easier to jail or shoot you.
Yeah, the history of the world has shown that private property is socially constructed. It's also shown that people who live under those systems can't form independent communities and tend much more often to end up on the wrong side of a Chinese firing squad.
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The RIAA wanted this service to go down first, because it was morally legal, and compliant with the intent, if not the letter, of the law.
Why did they want it? Because it kills the only way electronic distribution could work under current law, and preserves their monopoly. This monopoly is based on the fact that you have to buy a physical product to get the information. If you could skip that step, you could easily lose the record companies (to the betterment of music) as all their other services are based upon this. Remember, they don't on the music, just the RECORDINGS, so they have to make sure the recording is the only way you can listen to it aside from live performances.
If the recordings become licensable information rather than a physical product, then logically ASCAP and BMI are better suited to handle renumeration, as they deal in this sort of easily-copied information. Then where does Johnny Notalent get his revenge for having a tin ear? "Record Producer" and being able to trade sex for recording contracts sounds so much better than "BMI accountant"...
While even on a measily PII 233MHz you can play MP3s in the background with Winamp with no skipping or noticable performence hit
BS. I have a Win2K system 750/128 at work and it skips at EVERY FRIGGIN' IO while playing MP3s. By comparison, my 400 MHz G3 Power Computing clone Mac at home (with a truly crawling bus speed, 60MHz) does not skip, even when using that resource hog, iTunes. DOES NOT SKIP.
Sounds like you got a crappy iMac. Most used ones are. The ones that work tend to stay at work. We've had two at work for testing and both had major hardware problems. Used PCs are just fine, except they can't run current software because they're too slow. Used Macs, unless you buy them from a graphic design shop that's upgrading, are being dumped because someone forgot to return them within the warranty period.
nations that have missiles aren't likely to use them anymore than Russia is
But they are equally likely to threaten to use them, just as Russia has and, yes, does (as does China).
People who give the "suitcase bomb" argument just don't understand the politics of nuclear weapons. It takes the resources of a nation-state to make them, and at that point, they don't want it wasted on terrorism when they can suddenly make the leap to The Club, and gain the respect that Russia got. Do you think that anyone would pay attention to Russia right now if they didn't have nukes? They are a bananna republic with bombs (yes, I've been there, yes, I speak the language). So a power would indeed threaten to use them--and if the U.S. only lost one city, do you think that world opinion would support the genocide of an entire nation in response? What did the women and children of that country do to merit death, especially when we have not been totally destroyed?
And what U.S. politician would, absent a missile defense, be willing to call the bluff of someone who could remove a million or more voters? The U.S. was nearly paralyzed by the thought of biological weapons in Iraq--had they a demonstrated working nuke, public opinion would have never supported intervention.
By your logic, China can't threaten us now, so nothing changes for them. Russia can overwhelm the system easily. So what changes except for wannabe states? You'd think some people are just wanting to die in a nuclear blast.
no one is going to buy slower hardware to run a slower OS just because they want to "think different."
Gee, isn't that what PC users did until 2000? Oh, wait, they bought slower hardware to run a slower OS to "think conformity." I see the difference, now.
Seriously, there's no inherent reason why the PowerPC line can't eventually catch up (and MHz/MHz, it's still faster for most tasks), and OS X is at the beginning of its optimization cycle. NT is at the end of its cycle, and who knows if Intel can maintain the lead?
Even if Apple ported to x86-compatible architecture (think Athlon), it would probably use a subset and a different motherboard architecture so you couldn't run it on some POC Korean or homebuilt PC. Even the Dell I type this on has big problems running Win2K because PCs just have massive quality control problems in any given configuration. Apple's stuff "just works" because they integrate the hardware with itself and the OS.
...but only under certain tests, which this did not meet. Interesting to note that this had Ginsberg and Clarence "Oh my god he's so conservative he'll kill us all" Thomas in the majority together.
This wasn't a "liberals +1" vote, people. That's what's sad...liberals used to be able to be counted on for such things but now I can't even trust them to guard us against the police.
No, we're trying to get still farther from Europe, since we met you coming the other way 'round. (Australia).
Don't underestimate the power of the mind. It's a well-documented fact that, for instance, people will report feeling hot more often and estimate the temperature in the room to be much higher if accompanied by someone complaining that "it's hot in here!"
Pain is notoriously subjective, and while tendonitis is a real condition, many people who have heard of the problem and have an unhappy workplace might focus their feelings of dissatisfaction on their hands and wrists even if they don't have tendonitis. I know mine are twinging more as I write this because I'm thinking about it.
So to say that sometimes disease sufferers are suffering from a psychosomatic rather than a physical condition does not suggest that the disease doesn't exist or that people who report problems are "faking it." Psychosomatic most emphatically does NOT suggest it's being faked (i.e. someone who is pain free is reporting pain to gain sympathy in a court trial) but that its origin is in the mind.
Mass hysteria is a fascinating subject--witness the fainting spells that would communicate through suggestion in Vienna during Freud's time. Witness the waking dreams accredited to UFO abduction now versus demonic possession in the 1600s versus not at all in Japan. Suggestibility is also a fascinating subject: it is notoriously easy to suggest an alternate version of events to an eyewitness and get them to swear that something happened that didn't happen ("Now, did the man with the green sweater cross the street in front of or behind the car wreck?" when in fact there was no man in a green sweater).
So someone who studies these phenomena is not, ipso facto, out to prove they don't exist.
The bigger weakness is, how long do you think that cellular network is going to continue working once the USAF finds out it is vectoring in the interceptors?
Right...they already used some sophisticated anti-power-grid weapons in the war with Iraq. You could take out receivers simply by flying a few really strong transmitters at cell freuqencies on drones. And if they really want to get nasty, one good FOBS nuke will shut down the cellular networks but good through the EMP effect.
Yes, my PIII is hobbled by Win 2K.
Seriously, this is the same as I've seen for every Pentium I've installed SETI on...a PII 300, PIII ~600, and a PIII 750. The PIII 750 is the first one to actually get in the ballpark of a G3 400. Now, the G4 500 was still blowing them out of the water... 6 hours or so.
That's got to be wrong. My 750 PIII runs Seti@Home at a SLOWER speed than my G3 (note the 3) 400.
It's just because one of their 20 artists didn't release a record this year...Rush or Bryan Adams? I dunno....
...PS I thought Canada was a Socialist paradise and only evil America had organizations out to kill Napster????
Amen.
Not only is he expert at the same sort of crap that generates "Bible Codes" (does Wheat realize that he's the intellectual equivalent of a Pax Channel special or a Fox conspiracy-theory special?) but he's spectacularly bad at the one thing an English major should be good at: getting the INTENDED, OBVIOUS point of the damn story.
To wit: he expends all his energy on Bowman and The Odyssey and Zarathustra with an emphasis on telling the Human story of both "We are What We Make of Ourselves". The whole point of 2001 is that We Might Be Overestimating Our Place in the Universe, and We Wouldn't Even Understand Something Truly Advanced, but They Might Understand Us Better than We Ourselves. Wheat never addresses this theme in his comments, which leads me to think that his exercise in numerology misses the point as well. Surely there was at least one or two symbols present along that theme...maybe the impenetrable blackness of a certain monolith, representing the unknown?
Once again, Lit Crit types prove themselves to be staggeringly less elite and enlightened than they'd like us to believe.
When you have a small business it isn't terribly difficult to make sure you're selling things for more than they cost you
Maybe it's easy to take a look at the bottom line to make sure your net inflow was greater than your net outflow, but figuring that price ahead of time is no piece of cake.
First, you may pay something for an item, but don't forget there are a bunch of other costs involved. Rent, taxes, licenses, salaries, benefits, capital costs (a cash register costs something), business services, tax prep, legal costs, repair bills, utilities, insurance, costs, etc., etc., etc.
Now, a major corporation generally has major league accountants well versed in standard and acceptable (to VCs and institutional investors) accounting practices. A business usually has Quickbooks on an old PC and someone (if they are lucky) with an associate's degree in accounting.
Now, all you have to do is put that PC, the software, and Quickbooks together and try to figure out a price that will move enough merchandise at a low price or less merchandise at a higher price to keep up with those (usually variable) expenses (not to mention your competition, who may be a huge corporation), oh, and make sure it happens so that you always have cash on hand to pay your bills when they're due.
That may not be rocket science, but it ain't *easy*.
Only one organization has a publicly and legally recognized obligation in this arena, and that's a government.
Yes, and let's see: the American government has more legal obligations in this area than the UK government, since it has a bill of rights in a written constitution. So it ought to be the ideal, right?
- McCarthy
- Internment of Japanese
- Firebombing of civilians
- Bombing of MOVE
- Tuskeegee medical experiments
- releases of radioactive material on domestic populations
- Watergate
- Echelon
- Clinton bombing Iraq when he needed a distraction
- Bush--ditto
These are just a few. But basically only governments that lose wars have their officials jailed or otherwise punished. I fail to see your faith in it.
The Indian Government owned 51% of the Bhopal plant. What, were they going to sue themselves?
The citizens of India voted for their government, who had final oversite of the plant, and their government condemned them to death. Union Carbide may have some responsibility, but the solution most people are suggesting (government regulation) failed despite being much more intense than is allowed in the US generally (have any of your workplaces been owned 51% by the government lately? thought not).
As for SUVs, government regulations allow them to be less safe than cars and people still buy them. Who is turning a blind eye?
Corporations being a person is a strange concept, but please, lets find some examples where they're actually at fault instead of greedy, heedless consumers and corrupt governments.
But you're admitting the Apache binary has value, an "intrinsic" value in its ability to execute.
/usr/local/newapache/". Oh, wait, you need between $1500 to $3000 worth of equipment to make it that easy. Fortunately, 50% of America has equipment that could be put to that use. You need to have a fair amount of expertise to do anything with it, which takes a fair amount of time and effort to acquire.
.0000000000000001 percent of human history for which both ready-made clothes and computers were widespread in certain extremely wealthy parts of the world. So you couldn't sew a button, let alone a coat.
The source code is analogous to the pattern of the shirt. Yet in the parent comment, you claim it has no value, except "indirect" in its value to allow businesses to do other things more efficiently (though how they are going to serve web pages without a web server program is beyond me--perhaps it's HTTP over pigeons?). I'm glad you retract this claim.
OK. Now to replicating clothing. To replicate is to make a copy. In the case of software binaries, this is making a DIFFERENT part of the disk have magnetic states in the same pattern as the parent part. The manual labor part of this is pretty limited: type "cp apache
Now: you have a coat. It consists of some materials arranged in a pattern. If you purchase the same materials and use a sewing machine, you can reproduce it in a few hours. You need no skills to use it afterwards. If you take into account the cost of the labor, tools and materials for each, the coat is far cheaper to replicate.
It's not easier for you, because you've grown up in the
Will you, with your previous investments, be able to replicate more copies of apache in less time than a coatmaker? Sure. But the end result is changing the pattern of physical materials, and both take less effort for the average person than, say, replicating a Saturn V.
You confuse the design (the code) with the material (the disk bits with the pattern on it). Similarly, the sentences are not identical to the ideas they express. Therefore if I state you're not an economics major and never were, I've written a well-formed sentence that expresses a true idea. Therefore if I state you're not an economics major, I've written a well-formed statement that expresses a true idea. Bango--two sentences, with one common pattern--a single, true idea.
But the point I was getting at is that both have value in the context of the economy. One is not valueless. Both have values that are indirect. The coat is valuable because it keeps you warm...but that in and of itself, economically speaking, is only of value if keeping you warm allows you to do other things, because no one will yet pay you to keep warm (well, maybe in Sweden).
Geez, even Keynes had better economics than this:
"There is no intrinsic value in the actual ones and zeros which are replicated trivially and at low cost."
Really? I can put a 1, then a million 0's, and then a 1, and you can replicate it trivially and at low cost, but I don't think it has as much value as, say an Apache binary.
"What drives the economy is real production of goods: think food, clothing, energy, transportation etc....The value provided by software is related to *executing* the software."
Wow. There's no intrinsic value in a jacket lying on the floor. It's only when you *put it on* that it gains any value. So, by your own argument, clothing manufacturers, by putting out clothing that is "easily replicated and at low cost" (don't forget, just because you've paid for a computer with hard drive space instead of a loom and a few bags of fiber, doesn't mean that the cost of the infrastructure you have plus the skilled labor to make the duplication isn't real in either case), are just "weaving money".
Because the economy functions as a system, rather than as a tangible object, no one part has "intrinsic value". In fact, that's the whole lynchpin of the Open Source/Free Software argument: the services Open Source programmers provide are more valuable for being part of an entire, sharing community of coders. So much so, that it's more valuable than if they tried to not share their code and keep "innovations" to themselves to the point that other coders would also refuse to share "innovations". So much so, that they should be paid by companies to work on this stuff full time (unless you plan to do piecework in the clothing factory by day to fund your Open Source programming at night to enable the servers that power the factory's front office's billing system).
What a sad, small world you live in.
My sense of wonder is enhanced by understanding, not undermined. Perhaps it's a failing of those who would rather substitute stereotypes for characterization, bromides for solutions, vilification for criticism, and ignorance for a sense of wonder.
Science, to steal from Carl Sagan, is a candle in the dark. And the dark is only more interesting than the light if you have the unbearable hubris to believe that your puny imagination is more interesting than the awesome complexity that is reality.
Dammit, I'm the dark one in the family. Stop treadin' on my turf!
Don't feel too badly.
The buildings probably look that way from the washing out of the process--there was heavy photoshop "interpretation" of what the color balance should have been. The truth is that wood and coal stoves were used quite often then, and they made things look just as grimy and ugly. However, being a more thinly-populated and economically depressed era/region, there weren't as many of them.
It's fine to be an environmentalist--I am--but that doesn't mean you have to give up technology or economic progress. Taking our current population back to the technologies of the time would result in more, not less pollution.
The mantra, as always, should be "fission now to power our way to fusion later."
Replace every reference to "corporation" in your rant with "government" and it holds just as true.
Remember that the government of China refuses to institute a minimum wage (and in fact is the foreign company, lots of shoes are made in Chinese Army factories).
Everything you mention a corporation doing, governments have done 500 times worse. It wasn't a corporation that murdered 6 million Jews or dropped an atomic bomb on anyone.
Also, the previous poster did not say the aim was to "make money above all else", he just said "to make money." If you believe that making money is not one of your aims in your own life, you need to learn the art of introspection.
> Because they would just hire the Pinkertons, who would show up and kill the rioters.
Killing rioters is, except in rare cases of self defense, illegal. Killing peaceful demonstrators is never legal. Arresting them both if they break laws is perfectly legal and should be encouraged.
While I don't share the desire to privatize police, the point I think the original poster was trying to make is that government has a monopoly on the legal initiation of the use of force, which is why libertarians (small l) are much more against their data collection than that of corporations. Corporations also historically have a better behavior controller than governments: if they do something sufficiently heinous, people don't buy their products (except in the case of monopolies, which is why I support antitrust law).
Government, however, is a monopoly, and can legally do whatever it takes to make you obey the law, up to and including killing you if you don't (in the US, Japan, South Africa, and, until recently, Belgium--and elsewhere, too, if you count the fact that all countries allow the police to kill under certain circumstances). If the government isn't strictly limited, it can make you do whatever it wants and you don't have a realistic recourse--certainly nothing as easy as switching brands of washing powder.
Corporations cannot force you to give over information without your consent--usually they tie this to some product you want to entice you, but that's different from forcing. Sure, you "have" to have that MP3 ripper for free instead of using the paid version, but they require that information from you!! waaaaaaaa, I wanna pwayah for fwee, waaaaaaa, wifout givin' away no nassy infomation, waaaaaaa.
Really? Why did PG&E's workers have a higher-than-average life expectancy and no "cluster" of cases, then? Why wasn't chromium-6 found in groundwater in all the areas of the "cluster"? I said there were "releases", but in several places there were in fact no groundwater contaminants found.
Gee when the New York Times is called "right wing", it's a lefty crowd.
Wow, those who don't pay attention in logic class are doomed to make ASPs of themselves in public.
"You are an ignorant troll," whether preceded by "I believe" or not is an opinion, a statement of value or belief, not fact. It can be proven neither true nor untrue.
True statements making a claim about non-subjective reality are facts. Untrue statements are just claims.
What amazes me is how the "fact" accepted with blind faith by so many lefties (and increasingly righties, thanks to Pat Buchanan and Gore Vidal becoming busom buddies, revealing that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the twin thugs of politics, Left and Right) that corporations are able to effortlessly control public opinion is never contrasted with the identical efforts of ideological organizations and government.
Environmental Defense also has "grassroots" organizations organized from the top down. The government also holds press releases with scientists that are forced, on pain of losing grant money, to side with the Administration's position. They frequently abuse the objective reality you mention in favor of predetermined conclusions (cf. Erin Brockovich, where no chemicals were in fact found in the water supply, but because there were "releases" and a "possibility", lots of people lost their jobs to make a bunch of slimy lawyers rich).
Yet a blind faith that government and non-profit institutions are going to protect your (equally socially constructed) "right" to gather in communities suffuses the entire piece. If Environmental Defense doesn't like what you say, be sure you're going to feel the onslaught of a PR machine not inhibited by the sensitivity to not POing customers that corporations have. If the government doesn't like what you say, they won't waste time with PR. How much easier to jail or shoot you.
Yeah, the history of the world has shown that private property is socially constructed. It's also shown that people who live under those systems can't form independent communities and tend much more often to end up on the wrong side of a Chinese firing squad.