The answer is: nothing good, I'm sure. However, if you accept that what the influx of European colonists (and eventually, the United States government) did to the native American population was wrong, then what Mexico is doing to the United States is just as wrong.
Globalization is the whole reason that the United States is as prosperous as it is. The United States is exploiting the people of poorer countries to produce goods for the American consumer. Globalization actually benefits richer, more established countries over poorer countries with no infrastructure - while keeping it that way.
I've heard this before and I still don't buy it. If that were true, why do I, and millions upon millions of Americans like me, have less buying power now? Why has America's standard of living been dropping since the "global economy" wave hit our shores? China (not an ally, by the way) has been buying more and more U.S. dollars and is now at the point of influencing American fiscal policy, many of our critical assets (oil refineries, pipelines, power plants, shipping ports) have been sold, or are in the process of being sold, to foreign interests, energy prices have shot up exponentially in the past few years... uh huh. Globalization may very well be of benefit to those "more established countries" if a functioning tariff structure is in place to prevent the utter devastation of "established" domestic industry. That hasn't happened here, our manufacturing base is dwindling, and right along with it our cherished middle class. Where, exactly, did you think most of the middle class worked? In strip malls?
Oddly enough, the people that laid out the foundation of our society and our government were very much aware of this, and believed (as I do) that if you want to be a free country you also have to be an independent country. We fought a war over the twin ideals of political and economic freedom, but maintaining that freedom requires the ability to produce your own finished goods. America is in the process of sacrificing everything it gained in the past two hundred years and is becoming more and more dependent upon foreign powers, some of whom would like nothing better than to see us implode. Boeing, for example, now has to buy avionics manufactured in Japan, because nobody here makes them anymore. Our military is buying more and more equipment and products from China, because they can't get them here any longer. Don't even get me started on illegal immigration and undocumented worker issues with Mexico. Any way you look at this, it is a recipe for disaster.
Another poster said he felt I was wrong in characterizing the situation as a "war", but it is a multinational economic conflict between hostile powers (some of whom claim to be our allies. You know what they say, with friends like that...), whose outcome holds grave consequences for the U.S. So far as I'm concerned that qualifies it as a war, even if we aren't actually shooting at each other yet.
Well, charities are supposed to be a zero-sum game... they take in donations and ideally distribute the bulk of the funds after picking off an "administrative charge" for themselves. Of course, in many charities the administrative costs somehow exceed the amount actually distributed to the target population, but whatever. Many people look at the likes of Bill Gates as being paragons of greed, and that's true so far as it goes, but a lot of so-called charitable organizations are no better.
The Gates Foundation isn't a charity as such, in that it is not dependent upon random donations. It is dependent upon the profits earned on the seed money provided by Gates (and now Buffet, I guess) and is investing and re-investing that money in order to be self-sustaining. At least, that's how I understand it... correct me if I'm wrong.
The part that YOU don't understand, which is you get to come here if we say it's okay for you to come here. There are laws, there are rules, and one hell of a lot of people aren't paying one lick of attention to them. A lot of them work in Congress, and a lot of them run our corporations. Our laws were meant to serve our needs, not the needs of anyone whose screwed up country can't take care of them properly.
Now that's just goofy. Nobody in their right mind is arguing that anyone who was born in another nation is of no value to American society, and you don't have to be an Einstein to figure that out. On the other hand, a bonafide genius like Einstein (or Tesla, or von Braun, or Fermi, or any of the other remarkable immigrants that will no doubt be brought up as an example of how America is wrong to put its own people first) makes a poor example. He was an exception, someone that we would have made room for under any conditions. But... we're not talking about those. We're talking about the rank-and-file scientific and technology people in the U.S. that are being hit very hard by U.S. foreign and economic policy at the moment.
If there aren't enough workers in a particular industry, you raise salaries until enough people are attracted those fields and the shortfall is taken up. Salaries then level out or drop off once there is sufficient competition. What you don't do, if you're capable of thinking beyond the end of your nose, is start hiring foreign workers willy-nilly at a fraction of the salary you would have paid those domestic workers. Personally, I don't understand how the people in charge don't grasp the long-term consequences of their actions. Worse, once you've managed to eliminate your pool of domestic labor (which seems to be the desired result here) what are the odds that those H-1Bs will continue to work for peanuts? Zero, that's what, because you killed off their only competition. Some of these guys need to take a class in basic ecology.
What is being disputed, and rightfully so, is the ongoing displacement (i.e., PC for "shafting") of United States citizens in favor of foreign nationals who aren't citizens and (unless President Bush finally succeeds in completely eradicating the distinction between the two) probably never will be. In addition, because they are foreign nationals, we have no expectation of their remaining loyal to their U.S. employers or to our country, and those who eventually return to their homelands take whatever they've learned with them. If you're lucky, they just take back techniques and skills... if you're not, they take back your designs and prototypes. I've seen this firsthand, folks, and it isn't pretty.
America can easily keep its competitive edge by training more technical and scientific minds from its own population (like everybody else does.) This nonsense about "labor shortages" and "the American worker is substandard" to justify the use of large quantities of imported talent is simply MBA-speak for "we're cheap, shortsighted motherfuckers who will bone our fellow Americans up the ass to save buck on payroll." I'm not buying it, sorry. I don't know why America is supposed to be an exception to the basic rules under which all other nations operate... I guess it's because our political leaders and our (ahem!) "Captains of Industry" (which in Slashdot lingo translates to "fucktards") are easily exploited and have sold us down the economic river.
And before anyone starts complaining about the "global economy" and "what about the foreign tech worker?" Well, I'll tell you... I don't care. Neither of those two phenomena have caused us anything but heartache and pain. From the giant textile mills lying fallow back East, to the devastation of our domestic electronics manufacturing, to all the industrial ghost-towns around where I live, I can't see the benefit, really. What I do see is a massive transfer of wealth (and the capacity to create wealth) out of the United States, to our detriment.
Furthermore, when I see nations like India and China evincing the slightest (the slightest!) concern for the damage they are doing to the United States maybe I'll think differently. And yes, you can put Mexico on the short list as well. But I'll tell you this: none of t
About ten years ago or thereabouts, I watercooled a system by welding two pieces of copper tubing to a thin CPU-sized copper plate. I then used rubber tubing to run water from two buckets through the copper tubes. I used the siphon effect (one bucket high, one bucket low) and it worked fantastically well for a couple of hours (the CPU was at room temperature) until the water in the upper bucket ran out and I smelled something getting hot. Then I frantically moved the buckets around and got another couple of hours. I was impressed with how little water flow was required (I never bothered with a recirculating pump since it was just a way to kill an afternoon. I tried overclocking (a pain in the neck back then... motherboard jumpers out the yin-yang) and did get an extra 20% or so, if I remember correctly. I think it only a P133 or something like that.
Off topic a little (okay, a lot), but your comment applies to programming languages as well. When I was coding for the MCS6502 on an Apple ][ in 1978 or so, I had every instruction, every variation, every addressing mode in my head. The code just flowed. No need to waste time referring to documentation once I had learned the instruction set... my fingers never left the keyboard.
Flash forward twenty nine years. Nowadays, programming environments are so complex (I won't use the term "sophisticated", necessarily) that no mere human mind can easily encompass them in their entirety. Yes, there may be a function that does exactly what you want, but odds are you won't remember it's there (if you ever did know) and will just write it yourself anyway. Most developers I know (myself included) settle for a "core library" of features and functions in a particular language, functions that do the majority of what we need. To do otherwise would mean continually searching through programming manuals trying to find some little-used feature which might (or might not!) actually be there and might (or might not!) do what you really want. Not worth the effort: just do it yourself and get it over with.
Language and operating system designers rationalize the insane complexity of their creations by saying, "yes, it's true, no programmer/user will ever use all of what we provide, but the subset of features each programmer/user chooses will be different, so we have to put in the kitchen sink." Now, that is true to a degree, but I think that in many cases they have simply gone too far and productivity has actually suffered as a result. At the very least, a large percentage of their oh-so-valuable features go unused by a large percentage of users.
The reality is that it is usually the marketing departments that demand more and more stuff be added in order to make their claims of "ours is new and improved!" so they can achieve some unquantifiable degree of "market differentiation".
In the Microsoft world, if Vista stacks up against the current Apple offering and is not "bad" in comparison, why, that means that Vista is just absolutely fantabulous.
If only the rest of the world had the lack of national barriers like those in the scientific community.
You mean "lack of national barriers like North America." If the rest of the world were like us now with borders that are such in name only, well... you'd all have to learn Chinese, for one (we will too, no doubt, once we've all become competent in Spanish.) Besides, nation-states still serve a valuable purpose, the same one they've served for centuries. The question is not whether nations are bad (they're not, intrinsically) but what kind of political systems are running them.
The only way that nations will disappear is if a true global Empire is created and enforced, something along the lines of the Soviet Empire only much bigger. China could do it, maybe, if it has the political will and sufficient need for land and resources (the answer is probably "yes" in both cases, but that's just an opinion.) And even if such an Empire did come to pass, it's been pretty thoroughly demonstrated that central control simply doesn't work on even the scale of a single nation comprised of a single race. So, you'd have to have different regions under more localized control (call them "states" or "provinces" or whatever) which would eventually begin to resent the central government and would break away, once again forming sovereign nations. The Romans did a lot of things right, when it comes to managing an Empire (their's lasted for a long time, by our standards) but even they couldn't hold it together forever.
Unless some fundamental change in the human psyche occurs nations will be with us for a long time to come.
Look, if you want to avoid the whole issue of "robot's rights" ever being raised until such time as they are truly sentient, the solution is very simple:
Don't make them cute.
Animal rights activists are all over labs use little bunny rabbits, puppies, kittens, monkeys, pet hamsters in their little exercise wheels and other animals that evoke a positive emotional response in humans. Nobody gives a damn if a skunk or a pig or a raccoon gets induced tumors or liver failure from some untested pharmaceutical. So if you want people to simply not care about your machines, make them as far from "cute" as you possibly can. Is that hypocritical? I suppose, but the reality is that we place different values upon the lives of animals based how they make us feel. And, of course, whether we consider them good to eat.
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
They did... our elected representatives were supposed to be cycled through on a regular basis (a civic duty akin to serving on a jury) and then leave, go back to their jobs and live under the laws that they themselves imposed.. The Founders essentially placed a negative-feedback loop into our legislative system... brilliant, when you think about it. I might add that it worked well for a long time, but like most other aspects of our Federal Government it too eventually got subverted by the power-hungry.
Truly, the desire to have power over others, merely for the sake of having power over others (i.e., because it makes one feel good in and of itself) should be classified as a mental disorder and treated as such. It should also disqualify you from holding a position of power or authority until you've been cured and can prove it.
Not necessarily. I was a corporation for years when I ran a consulting business and I was an assembly of one.
Nevertheless, that's not what the law is concerned with, regarding "peaceful assemblies". As I tried to point out previously, peaceful assembly is where a group of people gather in order to communicate and discuss relevant social and governmental issues. The Founding Fathers realized early on that it is very difficult to muster effective opposition to an overarching government when people are fearful of gathering and organizing themselves. Look at the history of Colonial times, before the War of Independence. People (ordinary citizens!) gathered in secret and in public in order to effect change, in spite of British efforts to prevent and contain such actions. The Constitution specifically protects that sort of assembly, because (and this was one of the aspects to the United States Constitution that was rather unique, historically speaking) it was expected that at some point our government would (not might, would) fail to meet the needs of its citizens. Rather like it is doing now... so our Founders did what they could to make it possible for said citizens to rein in an errant ruling class.
An astonishing number of Americans no longer understand where the Founders were coming from (so much for our vaunted educational system) but so far as those great men were concerned, the corrective forces the citizenry could apply ranged from voting and politicking, to civil unrest, to out-and-out armed rebellion. They made no bones about it: a government that stops working in the best interests of its people should be replaced by any means necessary, because they foresaw the possibility that the United States Federal Government would one day become just as tyrannical as the foreign government from which they had just broken free. One has to wonder, seriously, what they would think of their brainchild now... what they would think of us now. I cannot help but believe that they would be bitterly disappointed. Not surprised, probably, but disappointed.
Sorry for running off topic like that. In any event, what this would have to do with a corporation or other business entity I don't know.
No, I don't think that's what the Constitution meant. The right of people to assemble peacefully was to allow and encourage a form of peaceful social protest without the government being able to break such an assembly up because it is inconvenient or critical of said government. Applying this to a corporation seems to be a bit of a stretch. But then again, I'm not a lawyer so who cares. For that matter, giving corporations the "rights" of individuals, or any significant subset of those rights, seemed a bit of a stretch to begin with.
how would you make "evil corporations" illegal without removing the right for individuals to peacably assemble?.
Because corporations aren't people except via the thinnest legal pretense, that dates back to a decision made in the last century by a single judge. The Constitution doesn't know much about corporations, evil or otherwise, and I doubt a "right of corporate entities to peaceably assemble" would be of much consequence to said organizations even if they had such a thing.
i see weird confluences of unseen consequences coming out of the new plasticity of identity due to how the web works in the generation currently in their teens, making its way into their very psychology. in ways us ancient fossils in our 20s and 30s won't even understand
I dunno. "Plasticity of identity" is all well and good until you go try and apply for a mortgage, or manage a career. Plastic people tend to get their attitudes readjusted real fast, when society eventually expects them to go through their stock of alternate personas and pick one.
Besides, young people have always put on different faces, different attitudes, experimenting to see what kind of reaction they provoke. This social-networking fad is nothing more than an extension of the normal social exploration that we all go through. Yes, it may have unexpected effects but there's a reason why you mostly see young people playing with their profiles like this. It's because we eventually figure out that, underneath it all, we're just who we started out to be anyway. At that point most of us drop the pretense. It takes too much effort to maintain.
Well, some years ago I used Classmates to find a girl I used to know back in high school (it was three decades ago but what the hell.) Turns out she's still hot and actually available after all these years. Unfortunately I wasn't (hot or available) so I don't know why I bothered in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you mean "native American".
The answer is: nothing good, I'm sure. However, if you accept that what the influx of European colonists (and eventually, the United States government) did to the native American population was wrong, then what Mexico is doing to the United States is just as wrong.
If you take money out of the equation
You can't take money out of the equation.
Globalization is the whole reason that the United States is as prosperous as it is. The United States is exploiting the people of poorer countries to produce goods for the American consumer. Globalization actually benefits richer, more established countries over poorer countries with no infrastructure - while keeping it that way.
I've heard this before and I still don't buy it. If that were true, why do I, and millions upon millions of Americans like me, have less buying power now? Why has America's standard of living been dropping since the "global economy" wave hit our shores? China (not an ally, by the way) has been buying more and more U.S. dollars and is now at the point of influencing American fiscal policy, many of our critical assets (oil refineries, pipelines, power plants, shipping ports) have been sold, or are in the process of being sold, to foreign interests, energy prices have shot up exponentially in the past few years
Oddly enough, the people that laid out the foundation of our society and our government were very much aware of this, and believed (as I do) that if you want to be a free country you also have to be an independent country. We fought a war over the twin ideals of political and economic freedom, but maintaining that freedom requires the ability to produce your own finished goods. America is in the process of sacrificing everything it gained in the past two hundred years and is becoming more and more dependent upon foreign powers, some of whom would like nothing better than to see us implode. Boeing, for example, now has to buy avionics manufactured in Japan, because nobody here makes them anymore. Our military is buying more and more equipment and products from China, because they can't get them here any longer. Don't even get me started on illegal immigration and undocumented worker issues with Mexico. Any way you look at this, it is a recipe for disaster.
Another poster said he felt I was wrong in characterizing the situation as a "war", but it is a multinational economic conflict between hostile powers (some of whom claim to be our allies. You know what they say, with friends like that
Well, charities are supposed to be a zero-sum game ... they take in donations and ideally distribute the bulk of the funds after picking off an "administrative charge" for themselves. Of course, in many charities the administrative costs somehow exceed the amount actually distributed to the target population, but whatever. Many people look at the likes of Bill Gates as being paragons of greed, and that's true so far as it goes, but a lot of so-called charitable organizations are no better.
... correct me if I'm wrong.
The Gates Foundation isn't a charity as such, in that it is not dependent upon random donations. It is dependent upon the profits earned on the seed money provided by Gates (and now Buffet, I guess) and is investing and re-investing that money in order to be self-sustaining. At least, that's how I understand it
We must have had the same teacher. I don't think he had giant pink wiggling, dancing, computer-generated floating dicks in mind though.
The part that YOU don't understand, which is you get to come here if we say it's okay for you to come here. There are laws, there are rules, and one hell of a lot of people aren't paying one lick of attention to them. A lot of them work in Congress, and a lot of them run our corporations. Our laws were meant to serve our needs, not the needs of anyone whose screwed up country can't take care of them properly.
Does that answer your question?
The very idea of a flying penis scares the hell out of me.
You mean like Albert Einstein?
... we're not talking about those. We're talking about the rank-and-file scientific and technology people in the U.S. that are being hit very hard by U.S. foreign and economic policy at the moment.
... if you're not, they take back your designs and prototypes. I've seen this firsthand, folks, and it isn't pretty.
... I guess it's because our political leaders and our (ahem!) "Captains of Industry" (which in Slashdot lingo translates to "fucktards") are easily exploited and have sold us down the economic river.
... I don't care. Neither of those two phenomena have caused us anything but heartache and pain. From the giant textile mills lying fallow back East, to the devastation of our domestic electronics manufacturing, to all the industrial ghost-towns around where I live, I can't see the benefit, really. What I do see is a massive transfer of wealth (and the capacity to create wealth) out of the United States, to our detriment.
Now that's just goofy. Nobody in their right mind is arguing that anyone who was born in another nation is of no value to American society, and you don't have to be an Einstein to figure that out. On the other hand, a bonafide genius like Einstein (or Tesla, or von Braun, or Fermi, or any of the other remarkable immigrants that will no doubt be brought up as an example of how America is wrong to put its own people first) makes a poor example. He was an exception, someone that we would have made room for under any conditions. But
If there aren't enough workers in a particular industry, you raise salaries until enough people are attracted those fields and the shortfall is taken up. Salaries then level out or drop off once there is sufficient competition. What you don't do, if you're capable of thinking beyond the end of your nose, is start hiring foreign workers willy-nilly at a fraction of the salary you would have paid those domestic workers. Personally, I don't understand how the people in charge don't grasp the long-term consequences of their actions. Worse, once you've managed to eliminate your pool of domestic labor (which seems to be the desired result here) what are the odds that those H-1Bs will continue to work for peanuts? Zero, that's what, because you killed off their only competition. Some of these guys need to take a class in basic ecology.
What is being disputed, and rightfully so, is the ongoing displacement (i.e., PC for "shafting") of United States citizens in favor of foreign nationals who aren't citizens and (unless President Bush finally succeeds in completely eradicating the distinction between the two) probably never will be. In addition, because they are foreign nationals, we have no expectation of their remaining loyal to their U.S. employers or to our country, and those who eventually return to their homelands take whatever they've learned with them. If you're lucky, they just take back techniques and skills
America can easily keep its competitive edge by training more technical and scientific minds from its own population (like everybody else does.) This nonsense about "labor shortages" and "the American worker is substandard" to justify the use of large quantities of imported talent is simply MBA-speak for "we're cheap, shortsighted motherfuckers who will bone our fellow Americans up the ass to save buck on payroll." I'm not buying it, sorry. I don't know why America is supposed to be an exception to the basic rules under which all other nations operate
And before anyone starts complaining about the "global economy" and "what about the foreign tech worker?" Well, I'll tell you
Furthermore, when I see nations like India and China evincing the slightest (the slightest!) concern for the damage they are doing to the United States maybe I'll think differently. And yes, you can put Mexico on the short list as well. But I'll tell you this: none of t
You completely missed the point.
Ah well. Kudos for the rant but not for comprehension.
About ten years ago or thereabouts, I watercooled a system by welding two pieces of copper tubing to a thin CPU-sized copper plate. I then used rubber tubing to run water from two buckets through the copper tubes. I used the siphon effect (one bucket high, one bucket low) and it worked fantastically well for a couple of hours (the CPU was at room temperature) until the water in the upper bucket ran out and I smelled something getting hot. Then I frantically moved the buckets around and got another couple of hours. I was impressed with how little water flow was required (I never bothered with a recirculating pump since it was just a way to kill an afternoon. I tried overclocking (a pain in the neck back then ... motherboard jumpers out the yin-yang) and did get an extra 20% or so, if I remember correctly. I think it only a P133 or something like that.
Did this guy say he lives in California?
I don't know, but just from the nature of the project I think we can be pretty sure that he does.
Probably far more that it is actually worth.
Off topic a little (okay, a lot), but your comment applies to programming languages as well. When I was coding for the MCS6502 on an Apple ][ in 1978 or so, I had every instruction, every variation, every addressing mode in my head. The code just flowed. No need to waste time referring to documentation once I had learned the instruction set ... my fingers never left the keyboard.
Flash forward twenty nine years. Nowadays, programming environments are so complex (I won't use the term "sophisticated", necessarily) that no mere human mind can easily encompass them in their entirety. Yes, there may be a function that does exactly what you want, but odds are you won't remember it's there (if you ever did know) and will just write it yourself anyway. Most developers I know (myself included) settle for a "core library" of features and functions in a particular language, functions that do the majority of what we need. To do otherwise would mean continually searching through programming manuals trying to find some little-used feature which might (or might not!) actually be there and might (or might not!) do what you really want. Not worth the effort: just do it yourself and get it over with.
Language and operating system designers rationalize the insane complexity of their creations by saying, "yes, it's true, no programmer/user will ever use all of what we provide, but the subset of features each programmer/user chooses will be different, so we have to put in the kitchen sink." Now, that is true to a degree, but I think that in many cases they have simply gone too far and productivity has actually suffered as a result. At the very least, a large percentage of their oh-so-valuable features go unused by a large percentage of users.
The reality is that it is usually the marketing departments that demand more and more stuff be added in order to make their claims of "ours is new and improved!" so they can achieve some unquantifiable degree of "market differentiation".
In the Microsoft world, if Vista stacks up against the current Apple offering and is not "bad" in comparison, why, that means that Vista is just absolutely fantabulous.
Good is a relative term, you know.
If only the rest of the world had the lack of national barriers like those in the scientific community.
... you'd all have to learn Chinese, for one (we will too, no doubt, once we've all become competent in Spanish.) Besides, nation-states still serve a valuable purpose, the same one they've served for centuries. The question is not whether nations are bad (they're not, intrinsically) but what kind of political systems are running them.
You mean "lack of national barriers like North America." If the rest of the world were like us now with borders that are such in name only, well
The only way that nations will disappear is if a true global Empire is created and enforced, something along the lines of the Soviet Empire only much bigger. China could do it, maybe, if it has the political will and sufficient need for land and resources (the answer is probably "yes" in both cases, but that's just an opinion.) And even if such an Empire did come to pass, it's been pretty thoroughly demonstrated that central control simply doesn't work on even the scale of a single nation comprised of a single race. So, you'd have to have different regions under more localized control (call them "states" or "provinces" or whatever) which would eventually begin to resent the central government and would break away, once again forming sovereign nations. The Romans did a lot of things right, when it comes to managing an Empire (their's lasted for a long time, by our standards) but even they couldn't hold it together forever.
Unless some fundamental change in the human psyche occurs nations will be with us for a long time to come.
Look, if you want to avoid the whole issue of "robot's rights" ever being raised until such time as they are truly sentient, the solution is very simple:
Don't make them cute.
Animal rights activists are all over labs use little bunny rabbits, puppies, kittens, monkeys, pet hamsters in their little exercise wheels and other animals that evoke a positive emotional response in humans. Nobody gives a damn if a skunk or a pig or a raccoon gets induced tumors or liver failure from some untested pharmaceutical. So if you want people to simply not care about your machines, make them as far from "cute" as you possibly can. Is that hypocritical? I suppose, but the reality is that we place different values upon the lives of animals based how they make us feel. And, of course, whether we consider them good to eat.
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
... our elected representatives were supposed to be cycled through on a regular basis (a civic duty akin to serving on a jury) and then leave, go back to their jobs and live under the laws that they themselves imposed.. The Founders essentially placed a negative-feedback loop into our legislative system ... brilliant, when you think about it. I might add that it worked well for a long time, but like most other aspects of our Federal Government it too eventually got subverted by the power-hungry.
They did
Truly, the desire to have power over others, merely for the sake of having power over others (i.e., because it makes one feel good in and of itself) should be classified as a mental disorder and treated as such. It should also disqualify you from holding a position of power or authority until you've been cured and can prove it.
Sorry, I'm holding it in reserve in case my current situation doesn't work out.
And corporation is an "assembly of people".
... so our Founders did what they could to make it possible for said citizens to rein in an errant ruling class.
... what they would think of us now. I cannot help but believe that they would be bitterly disappointed. Not surprised, probably, but disappointed.
Not necessarily. I was a corporation for years when I ran a consulting business and I was an assembly of one.
Nevertheless, that's not what the law is concerned with, regarding "peaceful assemblies". As I tried to point out previously, peaceful assembly is where a group of people gather in order to communicate and discuss relevant social and governmental issues. The Founding Fathers realized early on that it is very difficult to muster effective opposition to an overarching government when people are fearful of gathering and organizing themselves. Look at the history of Colonial times, before the War of Independence. People (ordinary citizens!) gathered in secret and in public in order to effect change, in spite of British efforts to prevent and contain such actions. The Constitution specifically protects that sort of assembly, because (and this was one of the aspects to the United States Constitution that was rather unique, historically speaking) it was expected that at some point our government would (not might, would) fail to meet the needs of its citizens. Rather like it is doing now
An astonishing number of Americans no longer understand where the Founders were coming from (so much for our vaunted educational system) but so far as those great men were concerned, the corrective forces the citizenry could apply ranged from voting and politicking, to civil unrest, to out-and-out armed rebellion. They made no bones about it: a government that stops working in the best interests of its people should be replaced by any means necessary, because they foresaw the possibility that the United States Federal Government would one day become just as tyrannical as the foreign government from which they had just broken free. One has to wonder, seriously, what they would think of their brainchild now
Sorry for running off topic like that. In any event, what this would have to do with a corporation or other business entity I don't know.
No, I don't think that's what the Constitution meant. The right of people to assemble peacefully was to allow and encourage a form of peaceful social protest without the government being able to break such an assembly up because it is inconvenient or critical of said government. Applying this to a corporation seems to be a bit of a stretch. But then again, I'm not a lawyer so who cares. For that matter, giving corporations the "rights" of individuals, or any significant subset of those rights, seemed a bit of a stretch to begin with.
how would you make "evil corporations" illegal without removing the right for individuals to peacably assemble?.
Because corporations aren't people except via the thinnest legal pretense, that dates back to a decision made in the last century by a single judge. The Constitution doesn't know much about corporations, evil or otherwise, and I doubt a "right of corporate entities to peaceably assemble" would be of much consequence to said organizations even if they had such a thing.
They're doing this for the environment.
... that's called a "side effect".
Technically
No, they're doing it to make money, gobs and gobs of it.
i see weird confluences of unseen consequences coming out of the new plasticity of identity due to how the web works in the generation currently in their teens, making its way into their very psychology. in ways us ancient fossils in our 20s and 30s won't even understand
I dunno. "Plasticity of identity" is all well and good until you go try and apply for a mortgage, or manage a career. Plastic people tend to get their attitudes readjusted real fast, when society eventually expects them to go through their stock of alternate personas and pick one.
Besides, young people have always put on different faces, different attitudes, experimenting to see what kind of reaction they provoke. This social-networking fad is nothing more than an extension of the normal social exploration that we all go through. Yes, it may have unexpected effects but there's a reason why you mostly see young people playing with their profiles like this. It's because we eventually figure out that, underneath it all, we're just who we started out to be anyway. At that point most of us drop the pretense. It takes too much effort to maintain.
Well, some years ago I used Classmates to find a girl I used to know back in high school (it was three decades ago but what the hell.) Turns out she's still hot and actually available after all these years. Unfortunately I wasn't (hot or available) so I don't know why I bothered in the first place.
So, yeah, okay. Ten points to Gothmolly.
What does Slashdot think -- is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?
Social networking aside, data portability isn't a big deal for 99.9% of computer users.
No, it's actually a contraction of "Pryor On", which is a Kuru-like comedic pathogen known for causing its victims to die laughing.