It's just a legal framework -- and no, you can never have "enough control" to guard against this. In a sole proprietorship, you are not legally distinct from your business, so any liabilities against the business can be taken out of your personal accounts. Assuming you are a legitimate business owner trying to make a profit (not just a shell corporation trying to avoid taxes), your biggest risk (I'm guessing) is from frivolous lawsuits.
The reason frivolous lawsuits exist is because business owners attempt to skimp out on their responsibilities to begin with. If you acted morally towards the people coming on to your property there'd be no grounds for a lawsuit.
Somebody slips on the sidewalk in front of your storefront and sues your business for gajillion dollars.
At which point you take pictures of the salt you put down, and there's no way they can win in court. Decided to take a larger profit and forgo putting salt down? Well, that was YOUR mistake.
Assuming they win & your business can't pay up, it comes out of your personal savings account (or other assets).
As well it should, if you were guilty. That's called REPENTANCE for those of us who believe in forgiveness.
It's the same reason people carry umbrella liability insurance -- because we can't guard against the stupidity & greed of other people.
So why not just carry standard property owner liability insurance and be done with it?
As a sole proprietarship, you are personally liable - down to your last nickel in your bank account, if your business incurs any liabilities.
As a sole proprietor, shouldn't you have enough control over your business to guard against this? And shouldn't you be moral enough to *want* to actually pay your liabilities when you do something wrong?
I've never understood why society allows LLCs and S-corporations to begin with- seems like a huge opportunity for con artists to take advantage of everybody else.
See, that makes no sense to me at all. For space to strech at such a high velocity with a horizon 53 billion light years away, you'd have to have the big bang expanding FASTER THAN LIGHT. That's a heck of a lot of information coming from apparently nowhere.
OK, I misspoke. I can believe that is indeed the case- but I can't see any natural explaination for it to be the case.
Ah, this is the "expanding universe" gravity theory, isn't it? The one where we're all getting uniformly bigger in such a way that we're accelerating at the universal gravitational constant but don't notice because everything else is getting bigger as well?
This is because the universe is expanding at such a rate that space itself is expanding faster than the speed of light.
Ok, you see, I've got a problem with that. It's a place I insert God because I simply can't understand it. Matter can't move faster than light. Energy can't move faster than light. So how the hell can space, which is defined by putting matter in it (even if it's only one hydrogen atom per cubic light year) be expanding faster than the speed of light? That makes no sense to me.
When I first read the article summary, I thought we had final proof of this paradox. Then I read the article, and realized that the sumarizer was off in his estimate of how old these objects are by.8 billion years (enough to move them to the correct side of the big bang).
Anything to explain the apparent faster-than-light light in the slashdot writeup (RTFA FIRST- in reality they're looking at stuff only 13.2 billion light years away, not 14 billion- which would indicate light that was older than the universe itself at 13.7 billion years old).
Slashdot's advertisers STILL CAN'T GET IT RIGHT. I just saw a CSS error, in Firefox 1.5, that disappeared with a reload. Obviously a top of screen banner ad went bad.
(I'm especially thinking of objects and classes, which are mainstays of most languages).
An object in a higher level language is just a struct in C. A class is just an object that has been bundled with code that acts upon that object. No big deal- basic C can handle this, and there's a darn good teaching opportunity in doing it the long way.
This will be the final time I'll post in this thread- a text adventure game is an interesting enough exercise that it will take up to a full semester to program, and will teach all of the above concepts when you're done.
Gee, when I went through flowcharts were considered fourth grade computer science material- and that was in the late 1970s. Aren't they teaching basic boolean algebra to kids anymore?
But I do have a tendency to agree- thus my emphasis on text adventures I've noted previously. Basic IO, a single data structure, and pointers. What more do you need?
Don't forget the age-old Text Adventure. It's a natural for data structures, pointers, linked lists, binary trees, data nets, and object orientation. Give them the basic data structure with description pointer, item list pointer (that always blew my mind- a pointer to a list of pointers to a string of chars), four direction pointers (also a mind blower as now you've got a self-referencing object- pointers pointing to other objects of the same type), etc. Plus it's really easy to do in C and gives a lot of satisfaction quickly.
And don't forget the importance of Dungeon Style Adventure Games. No better way I know of to teach data structures, pointer math, and basic object orientation all in one shot.
Well, at that time there was this little country called, what's its name? Oh yeah, the USSR, that happened to have nuclear weapons too, and was supporting the Vietcong.
In retrospect we know that at the time, even their civilian space program only had a 20% successfull launch rate- the majority of those weapons, if launched, would have fallen within the USSR. But that's beside the point. The reality is that the United States is the impotent, incompetant, sleeping giant. We haven't won a war in 59 years, and we've forgotten how. You can either look upon that as a good thing (it's certainly good for the Islamic fundamentalists) or a bad thing (since without the United States, there really isn't any anti-war movement at all in the world right now).
There may well be nothing we can do about the arctic now, but it doesn't mean that we should do nothing since the melting arctic is not the final effect of global warming. THe longer we do nothing = more and more drastic effects around the world.
Possibly true- but the answer is that we need more plant life. MASSIVELY more plant life. The melting arctic *also* means melting tundra- which means more methane released in the next 40 years than all the animal life on the planet has done in the last 300 years. We need to absorb it- and trees do so. We need to start urban & desert planting programs. Bonus if we use fruit trees that grow nice straight trunks, or bamboo we can use to replace other wood for building.
Ah, but see, you've missed the point of TFA- THIS symptom of global warming is a tipover point that does NOT depend upon atmospheric carbon to continue. You could completely wipe out atmospheric carbon, and the northern polar ice cap would still disappear, from the difference in heat absorption between ice & water alone. This might have worked a few years back- but it won't work today to stop the feedback loop.
If what you said was true large portions of the earth should be underwater every summer.
When it is summer in the North, it is winter in the South- so it stays relatively in balance up until now.
The difference is, the South has a rather big landlocked continent- as it's ice melts, it freshens the ocean, but doesn't change the heat absorption. The North is an ocean under the ice- when it melts, it absorbs more heat, thus creating TFA's feedback loop. So what YOU say might be true within the next 34 years or so.
RTFA- Atmospheric CO2 or even methane has NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS FEEDBACK LOOP, except maybe for starting it. You could kill off every cow on the planet, shut down every CO2 producer, and the arctic ice would STILL be gone by 2040- because the cause (ocean absorbing more sunlight than ice) is a positive feedback loop that has already started.
In other words, the argument is over, global warming is happening, and it's far too late to play the blame game.
I choose Thermonuclear War! - We could always try and block out the sun, after all the last climate threat was global cooling due to particulates in the atmosphere.
Nothing to hit where we need it- there ain't no dry land up there to dig up with our nuclear weapons to create the particulate matter.
This is a tipping point. It doesn't matter if global warming is manmade or a natural cycle. Cutting your carbon emmissions will not stop this feedback loop. Once reached, this feedback loop will continue until all the ice is melted during the summer, and there is NOTHING we can do about it with current technology.
2nd response- replying to the subject line alone. On the subject of war, I'm actually downright schizophrenic- I think that the best defense is a technological defense that kills anybody who challenges it, not a good offense. I think that war needs to be something that is *feared*- and when it becomes something that isn't, we need a military response that is so incredibly out of porportion to the offense that war once again becomes something to be feared. And finally, I'm a patriot- I love my country and think we could DOMINATE the rest of the world- if we'd just let ourselves do once again what it takes to WIN a war (the last war the United States won was WWII- and the world has forgotten. For all of our superpower status, we have not won a conventional war since 1947, and we've been principal builders in the countries we did defeat back then. If I was an enemy of the United States, I wouldn't be very afraid- we may be the sleeping giant, but we're the completely bumbling and incompetent sleeping giant.).
Slashdot Mirror
It's just a legal framework -- and no, you can never have "enough control" to guard against this. In a sole proprietorship, you are not legally distinct from your business, so any liabilities against the business can be taken out of your personal accounts. Assuming you are a legitimate business owner trying to make a profit (not just a shell corporation trying to avoid taxes), your biggest risk (I'm guessing) is from frivolous lawsuits.
The reason frivolous lawsuits exist is because business owners attempt to skimp out on their responsibilities to begin with. If you acted morally towards the people coming on to your property there'd be no grounds for a lawsuit.
Somebody slips on the sidewalk in front of your storefront and sues your business for gajillion dollars.
At which point you take pictures of the salt you put down, and there's no way they can win in court. Decided to take a larger profit and forgo putting salt down? Well, that was YOUR mistake.
Assuming they win & your business can't pay up, it comes out of your personal savings account (or other assets).
As well it should, if you were guilty. That's called REPENTANCE for those of us who believe in forgiveness.
It's the same reason people carry umbrella liability insurance -- because we can't guard against the stupidity & greed of other people.
So why not just carry standard property owner liability insurance and be done with it?
With all the frivolous litigation going on, about the only way to effectively and economically guard against it is to move offshore.
While I understand the basic concept- the frivolous litigation wouldn't be anything like what it is if businesses operated morally to begin with.
As a sole proprietarship, you are personally liable - down to your last nickel in your bank account, if your business incurs any liabilities.
As a sole proprietor, shouldn't you have enough control over your business to guard against this? And shouldn't you be moral enough to *want* to actually pay your liabilities when you do something wrong?
I've never understood why society allows LLCs and S-corporations to begin with- seems like a huge opportunity for con artists to take advantage of everybody else.
See, that makes no sense to me at all. For space to strech at such a high velocity with a horizon 53 billion light years away, you'd have to have the big bang expanding FASTER THAN LIGHT. That's a heck of a lot of information coming from apparently nowhere.
OK, I misspoke. I can believe that is indeed the case- but I can't see any natural explaination for it to be the case.
Ah, this is the "expanding universe" gravity theory, isn't it? The one where we're all getting uniformly bigger in such a way that we're accelerating at the universal gravitational constant but don't notice because everything else is getting bigger as well?
This is because the universe is expanding at such a rate that space itself is expanding faster than the speed of light.
.8 billion years (enough to move them to the correct side of the big bang).
Ok, you see, I've got a problem with that. It's a place I insert God because I simply can't understand it. Matter can't move faster than light. Energy can't move faster than light. So how the hell can space, which is defined by putting matter in it (even if it's only one hydrogen atom per cubic light year) be expanding faster than the speed of light? That makes no sense to me.
When I first read the article summary, I thought we had final proof of this paradox. Then I read the article, and realized that the sumarizer was off in his estimate of how old these objects are by
Nah, that's just propaganda from the flat universalists!
----------
Slashdot standards indicate that you can't have a thought that takes less than 20 seconds to type- so I added this sentence.
Anything to explain the apparent faster-than-light light in the slashdot writeup (RTFA FIRST- in reality they're looking at stuff only 13.2 billion light years away, not 14 billion- which would indicate light that was older than the universe itself at 13.7 billion years old).
Slashdot's advertisers STILL CAN'T GET IT RIGHT. I just saw a CSS error, in Firefox 1.5, that disappeared with a reload. Obviously a top of screen banner ad went bad.
(I'm especially thinking of objects and classes, which are mainstays of most languages).
An object in a higher level language is just a struct in C. A class is just an object that has been bundled with code that acts upon that object. No big deal- basic C can handle this, and there's a darn good teaching opportunity in doing it the long way.
This will be the final time I'll post in this thread- a text adventure game is an interesting enough exercise that it will take up to a full semester to program, and will teach all of the above concepts when you're done.
Gee, when I went through flowcharts were considered fourth grade computer science material- and that was in the late 1970s. Aren't they teaching basic boolean algebra to kids anymore?
But I do have a tendency to agree- thus my emphasis on text adventures I've noted previously. Basic IO, a single data structure, and pointers. What more do you need?
Don't forget the age-old Text Adventure. It's a natural for data structures, pointers, linked lists, binary trees, data nets, and object orientation. Give them the basic data structure with description pointer, item list pointer (that always blew my mind- a pointer to a list of pointers to a string of chars), four direction pointers (also a mind blower as now you've got a self-referencing object- pointers pointing to other objects of the same type), etc. Plus it's really easy to do in C and gives a lot of satisfaction quickly.
And don't forget the importance of Dungeon Style Adventure Games. No better way I know of to teach data structures, pointer math, and basic object orientation all in one shot.
Claiming that companies are still American when almost all of their manufacturing is overseas: What else can we expect from a lying capitalist?
Well, at that time there was this little country called, what's its name? Oh yeah, the USSR, that happened to have nuclear weapons too, and was supporting the Vietcong.
In retrospect we know that at the time, even their civilian space program only had a 20% successfull launch rate- the majority of those weapons, if launched, would have fallen within the USSR. But that's beside the point. The reality is that the United States is the impotent, incompetant, sleeping giant. We haven't won a war in 59 years, and we've forgotten how. You can either look upon that as a good thing (it's certainly good for the Islamic fundamentalists) or a bad thing (since without the United States, there really isn't any anti-war movement at all in the world right now).
Won't work in this case- there aren't any volcanos close enough.
There may well be nothing we can do about the arctic now, but it doesn't mean that we should do nothing since the melting arctic is not the final effect of global warming. THe longer we do nothing = more and more drastic effects around the world.
Possibly true- but the answer is that we need more plant life. MASSIVELY more plant life. The melting arctic *also* means melting tundra- which means more methane released in the next 40 years than all the animal life on the planet has done in the last 300 years. We need to absorb it- and trees do so. We need to start urban & desert planting programs. Bonus if we use fruit trees that grow nice straight trunks, or bamboo we can use to replace other wood for building.
Ah, but see, you've missed the point of TFA- THIS symptom of global warming is a tipover point that does NOT depend upon atmospheric carbon to continue. You could completely wipe out atmospheric carbon, and the northern polar ice cap would still disappear, from the difference in heat absorption between ice & water alone. This might have worked a few years back- but it won't work today to stop the feedback loop.
If what you said was true large portions of the earth should be underwater every summer.
When it is summer in the North, it is winter in the South- so it stays relatively in balance up until now.
The difference is, the South has a rather big landlocked continent- as it's ice melts, it freshens the ocean, but doesn't change the heat absorption. The North is an ocean under the ice- when it melts, it absorbs more heat, thus creating TFA's feedback loop. So what YOU say might be true within the next 34 years or so.
RTFA- Atmospheric CO2 or even methane has NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS FEEDBACK LOOP, except maybe for starting it. You could kill off every cow on the planet, shut down every CO2 producer, and the arctic ice would STILL be gone by 2040- because the cause (ocean absorbing more sunlight than ice) is a positive feedback loop that has already started.
In other words, the argument is over, global warming is happening, and it's far too late to play the blame game.
Would be interesting for political and religous reasons, but sadly it's about 44-45 degrees off for actually doing anything to the North Pole.
I choose Thermonuclear War! - We could always try and block out the sun, after all the last climate threat was global cooling due to particulates in the atmosphere.
Nothing to hit where we need it- there ain't no dry land up there to dig up with our nuclear weapons to create the particulate matter.
Refrigerators need a place to dump the heat. In fact, a giant refrigerator is exactly what is happening right now to melt the ice!
This is a tipping point. It doesn't matter if global warming is manmade or a natural cycle. Cutting your carbon emmissions will not stop this feedback loop. Once reached, this feedback loop will continue until all the ice is melted during the summer, and there is NOTHING we can do about it with current technology.
2nd response- replying to the subject line alone. On the subject of war, I'm actually downright schizophrenic- I think that the best defense is a technological defense that kills anybody who challenges it, not a good offense. I think that war needs to be something that is *feared*- and when it becomes something that isn't, we need a military response that is so incredibly out of porportion to the offense that war once again becomes something to be feared. And finally, I'm a patriot- I love my country and think we could DOMINATE the rest of the world- if we'd just let ourselves do once again what it takes to WIN a war (the last war the United States won was WWII- and the world has forgotten. For all of our superpower status, we have not won a conventional war since 1947, and we've been principal builders in the countries we did defeat back then. If I was an enemy of the United States, I wouldn't be very afraid- we may be the sleeping giant, but we're the completely bumbling and incompetent sleeping giant.).