Actually "slavery" is far less advantageous for industry than "salary". With the "salary" system, you get a vast supply of easy to exchange workers that you don't have to worry about. With globalization, free trade, and "salary", Ricardo's "iron law of wages" works better than ever --
It is sometimes asserted that competition in a context of free trade and free circulation of capital is reactivating Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages, according to which wages will automatically tend to stabilise at the minimal subsistence level. This did not happen before now, as this reasoning goes, because, contrary to the assumption of Malthus, population growth was curbed in the societies experiencing the industrial revolution and workers were able to protect their interests, albeit through fierce struggle, riots, and revolutions. Subsequently, workers were able to organise themselves in trade-unions and political parties. Today, however, through free trade, the free circulation of capital and the resulting competition, workers and employees are in a global competitive situation with consequences not only for employment but also for wages and security....
I think when you get all the data in front of you, it is easy to see that "globalization" benefits only the very wealthy.
Most studies have shown that "local economies" tend to be best for the people. Even the inventor of the Euro currency feels he made a big mistake and that the individual countries of Europe will ultimately be worse off with a unified currency vs. local currencies.
Local economies vs. global economies is not a capitalism vs. socialism issue. The Soviet Union (USSR) was a giant economy comprised of many countries, but it produced results that were incredibly bad for most people living in the USSR.
There is simply no human reason to embrace globalization. The frenzied greed to make as much profit as possible without any consideration of the means or the ultimate costs is pathological. If we weren't so concerned about profits, everyone would be better off.
The last people on earth to listen to (much less trust) regarding "what to do" with the lives and jobs of middle class Americans are the CEOs of the world's largest multi-national companies. These people care about the personal payoff for them, not much else.
Especially companies that have been firing US workers at a record pace. Extra especially CEOs such as Carly Fiorano who is known to be a technlogy illiterate beancounter whose only skill is to chop costs by chopping workers.
When USA CEOs move jobs offshore, the corporation is the only one that benefits. Profits go up as costs go down. The bulk of India's IT output goes to the US, it does not go to India. Similarly with China's industrial output. The only reason these countries get the big business from the USA is to increase profits of USA companies.
Corporate profits of US companies go mostly into various payoffs for CEOs, top management, and large institutional shareholders. For the many technology companies that do not pay dividends, there is no payoff for small shareholders.
It is no surprise that there are many US companies under investigation for conflicts of interest between shareholders and management.
So what happens when millions of middle class workers are fired from US companies and their jobs moved offshore?
As we have learned in other industries, once jobs are moved offshore, they never come back. A nation tends to lose entire industry segments. Witness the lack of manufacturing capability in the US today.
As the middle class shrinks, the economy will also shrink. However, having moved their production offshore, HP, Intel, and others can sacrifice the US middle class so that they can then sell products to the rapidly growing Indian and Chinese middle classes.
It is the US middle class worker, the biggest US taxpayer, that gets to support HP, Intel, and other USA corporations growing their profits and then ultimately this trusting middle class worker gets stabbed in the back.
As public companies on the US stock exchange, it is a major conflict of interest between shareholders (US people) and management (CEOs and their top lieutenants) to move jobs offshore.
It is my personal belief that any CEO of a US public company that offshores jobs should be fired immediately for conflict of interest and should be fully subject to criminal prosecution.
I make the distinction of a public company as shares have been sold to Americans under a set of promises and expectations. People invest in an American company to help build America, the lives of Americans, not just fill the pockets of a few greedy CEOs. By replacing US workers with foreign workers, the CEO of a US public corporation is in breach of contract with the shareholders.
Furthermore by breaching this contract, HP and other companies could be shown to be acting in "bad faith" versus the interests of their shareholders and the whole of America itself. The consequences of an American CEO breaking faith and betraying the people of America should be a long stay in prison.
I think the key point here is that there is a lot of DRM that ships with "Mac OS X", not just iTunes. I don't want to have to find a workaround for all sorts of little things because Apple includes DRM sprinkled all around their OS/apps.
As for what is an "OS" and what is not, everything I mentioned other than FCP ships with "Mac OS X". While in a technical sense, some of the DRM may not be in the OS kernel, it is still part of what the consumer considers the "OS". Because all of Mac OS X is not open source, we don't know what is in the shipping OS anyway.
Time will tell if Apple's strategy of making a small part of something similar to their OS open source will provide them with any market advantage.
So far, Apple has taken far more from the open source community than they have given back, so they are nothing more than a parasite.
In the Apple world, DRM, or digital rights management, is built into Apple digital hub products like iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, Quicktime, etc.
You might as well delete all "iLife", Quicktime, and all the other Apple software you use if you want to have a better chance of getting rid of DRM on Mac OS X.
There are many ways DRM pops its ugly head up on Mac. For instance, Apple decided not to enable screen captures so that you can't grab still frames of a DVD movie. Not even even your own DVD movie shot with your own camcorder.
And of course, if you don't have Apple's DRM system running, you cannot play back the MP4 AAC files you purchase from the iTunes store as they are encrypted and have DRM access controls.
When it comes to Darwin, Apple only released the code because Darwin is comprised of much open source code that likely has licensing requirements to maintain the openness of the code. I'm sure Apple likes all the free bug finding and fixing they get as well.
BTW, if you can prove that the shipping OS X is fully built from the published Darwin sources, by all means do so. I cannot do so, that is what I already said. Apple's website says "Many of the projects in the Darwin repository are the same live source trees used by Apple engineers for the Mac OS X product build." Which implies Darwin is not quite the same as shipping Mac OS X.
All in all, I believe I've been accurate in my comments regarding Apple and Mac OS X. Apple has a lot of DRM on their platform, not just iTunes. And Darwin is not totally the same code as Apple's Mac OS X.
Technically, the article was a good overview of the various bits and pieces of Mac OS X.
However, the article either skipped or provided very skimpy coverage of Apple's DRM system and the defacto closed source nature of Mac OS X.
The one gigantic difference between Linux/*BSD and OS X / Windows is that Linux and *BSD are *open source* while Mac OS X and Windows are *closed source*.
While there are a few pieces of Mac OS X that are open source, much of it is not. And as far as I have read, there is no way to know if what you run as Mac OS X was even built from the published Darwin sources.
Open source matters as without a full open source OS (and tool chain), an OS simply cannot be trusted. Much as there are many rumors of spyware in Windows (and some documented cases), the same sort of spyware is likely to be in Mac OS X as well. This is especially true given the environments in the western world, especially the USA and EU, with more and more draconian police state laws being passed every day.
I noticed the author didn't mention Apple's closed source DRM system, for instance. It doesn't exist in his model of Mac OS X. That was good for a chuckle. It is these sorts of externally managed and controlled "rights" systems that are most likely to invade a person's privacy and violate a person's legal and natural rights. I suppose the author didn't want to upset people with stuff they shouldn't know about...
Mac OS X certainly is a full-featured corporate OS. However, it will never be considered a trusted OS until it is fully open source. Unless a person is incredibly ingenuous, he cannot have unknown black box "digital prison management" software on his closed-source OS machine and think "yes, I trust this computer".
While opinions on the matter differ, I believe the big force driving the popularity of Linux is "trust". It is far easier to trust a product that is owned by an open community -- with everything that entails -- versus a product that is owned by a vendor whose sole goal is to bleed you for as much money as possible and return as little value to you as possible.
There is little doubt in anyone's mind that both Apple and Microsoft are out to take as much of your money as possible. Microsoft is a known monopoly with monopoly pricing and Apple is just a Mini-Me version of Microsoft, complete with their own monopoly pricing in their closed market. In an industry of low margins, Apple is legendary for their extremely high profit margins and how they respond to problems with their products only if you threaten them with drastic legal action.
It is easy to understand the author's personal preference, as a wealthy American, for Mac OS X. It works well, it looks reasonably good, and it's trendy in various American subcultures, from drug subculture, to music subculture, to the social elite subculture. So why not go with the trend? It seems like modern American culture, especially their foreign policy, management ethos, and environmental policy is "rip/mix/burn".
The great truth, though, is that Mac OS X it is not a healthy choice for the world, for humanity.
I often say "people may be ignorant, but mostly they are not stupid". And so, wisely, most people in the world avoid an expensive closed source OS from one of the world's greediest and most abusive corporations.
And while Windows users are captive under the power of a monopoly, slowly more and more of them are moving away from their closed source OS to the open source world.
There are many reasons that Apple's global market share is falling every year, but one of the most important is that even when you spend all the money it takes to buy into the Apple computing world (religion?), you still do not get a trusted computer.
Meanwhile the Linux world is getting closer and closer to giving people everything they need in "good enough" form, all in an open, trustworthy, and transparent manner.
Maybe Apple can ponder this as they wonder why -- with all that "insanely great" technology --- most people are deciding they really don't need to buy an expensive yet ultimately untrustable Mac.
The fact that the RIAA can dictate classroom teaching is irrefutable proof of the corruption of our government. It also shows that public school is merely the brainwashing arm of the corporate-state dictatorship.
As for public schools, they've been dumbing down American kids for a long time now. Charlotte Iserbyt's excellent book explains all --
"I applaud Iserbyt for her shocking, completely documented expose. A dynamite book which presents a clear chronology of educational restructuring. Compelling evidence shows school reform, supported by all political stripes, to be a totalitarian plan using Skinnerian behavior modification and other equally manipulative psychological techniques to subjugate future generations in a state of ignorant bliss."
O. Jerome (Jed) Brown, M.A., 25 yr. teacher, former candidate WA State Supt. of Public Instruction
"This country, if it is to remain a sovereign, free and independent America, depends upon the greatest number of Americans reading and acting upon the information in this timely book."
Ann Herzer, M.A., Reading Specialist, 20 yr. teacher, former candidate AZ Supt. of Pub. Inst., member Dau. Am. Rev.
If you read nothing else, read Charlotte's article, No American Left Alone. It's an eye opener --
President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" could be referred to as "No American Left Alone" since what we are looking at is what the National Alliance of Business, which supports "planned economy," refers to as Kindergarten through Age 80 Education/Training. This is basically the United Nations Lifelong Learning- Brainwashing Agenda under the umbrella of what will eventually be "unelected" school and community councils (council is defined as "soviet" in many dictionaries) which will make all decisions for us at the local level. Former Senator Bill Bradley, N.J., called for this on one of the Sunday morning talk shows about four years ago. The Governors, very recently at their NGA conference, discussed the use of unelected (politically-correct?) citizens to police our communities. This is so unbelievable I find it hard to even write about it. (...)
Virtually every major consumer service provider is moving towards flat rate pricing. It is far simpler for the service provider and far simpler for the consumer. Not only is it simpler, it is also cheaper. The service provider saves a lot of money on billing which is priced as a function of complexity. Flat rate packages provide a great value for the consumer and also simplify the consumer's finances. There is good reason that millions of consumers are moving to flat rate service providers.
As a micropayment system is complex and costs a tremendous amount of money to implement, staff, and maintain, the consumer can expect costs to be higher when using this sort of system. I might add for emphasis that only a fool would think the higher costs are not going to be passed on to the consumer. Not to mention that the consumer now has to track their own actions on a minute scale that will take lots of time. Imagine instead of having one "pay per view" system to keep track of, you now have 17 "click per view" systems to worry about. It is like every channel on your satellite TV having its own pay-per-view system and account. It's not something many people would willingly sign up for, that's for sure.
So why do some companies want to buck the big flat rate trend in consumer pricing and create high complexity micropayment systems?
The answer is simple -- they want your money. With micropayments, a service provider gets your money up front, gets to keep your money in an account which generates float revenue, and is in the superb position of forcing the consumer to spend the money on potentially uninteresting things in order for the consumer to feel the money is not being wasted. Many micropayment systems have no way of getting your money out.
However, the biggest reason companies are pushing micropayments is that if they can shift the consumer's expectations to think "every time I do any little thing, I am going to pay", it will be a giant door opening to much higher prices for everything you do in life.
Check your ATM balance? Costs money. Press play three times on that song vs. once, costs extra money. The list will be endless. Micropayments are also a way to do an end run around "try before you buy". Instead of free song samples or free content samples, you'll be told "don't worry, it's micropayments."
The major banks have done large computer simulations and they have found they can make far more money using hard to understand variable cost transaction fees than they can using any sort of flat rate fee model. Now the banks are even more clever in that they combine the best of both worlds -- they package up seldom used services and charge a flat fee and then take more commonly used services and charge the variable rate transaction fee. Of course merchants will copy the banking system models and implement fee-based pricing that also allows you to go into negative dollars, so you will owe money. And don't forget the "micropayment account overdraft fee". Which will not be a micropayment, I guarantee you.
The heart of the matter is that micropayment systems are driven by greed. They are not driven by any desire to deliver value to the consumer. They are created to force a complex intermediary between the consumer and the service provider. The costs of this intermediary are significant and they are passed on to the consumer. The economic models that drive micropayments favor maximizing profits for the service provider.
All in all, micropayments are abuse waiting to happen. Consumers have avoided them like the plague for good reason. Though it's hard to believe, consumers want to hold on to their money. Pricing model studies have shown that they are tired of getting nickel and dimed to death. Consumers want clear value and the peace of mind that they can use a resource without the worry of variable fees sneaking up and biting them. No one has the discretionary money or discretionary time anymore to worry about the complexity of adding many new payment systems -- neither consumers nor service providers. Maybe one day in the future, micropayments will make sense. But I don't think that day is today.
Please note I did not say "ruthless amoral evil company". I purposely left the "evil" out as Microsoft is representative of most large corporations.
The companies you mention all are perhaps more "evil" than Microsoft, but likely less ruthless as well. The record industry has fought for all sorts of heinous laws to punish their customers, the same as Microsoft has in the software industry (DMCA, NET Act, UCITA, etc.). Microsoft -- doing the same thing as the record industry -- has sent goons to Compaq and other OEMs when negotiations didn't go their way. Microsoft (a software monopoly) and the music industry (a content oligopoly) seem about the same in that they are both big companies that act ruthlessly and amorally.
If you took Microsoft and put them in any industry, they'd be the very worst that is tolerated in that particular industry. Don't make the mistake of thinking all industries are the same and can be compared equally. If Microsoft were a diamond mining company, I'm sure they'd have deathtraps galore. As it is, Microsoft is offshoring more and more jobs to slave labor countries. Is that any better?
Microsoft has gotten where they are by being absolutely ruthless. There is a reason that they have over half a billion dollars of court judgments pending against them with more in the works. The company is known for bending, twisting, and ignoring the law, stealing from their partners, stealing from their customers, and for many illegal acts in how they make contracts, structure business deals, spy on your information, etc.
It will be interesting to see how the backlash against the Microsoft Tax develops over the next 5-10 years. People, organizations, and countries will need alternatives to Microsoft simply to survive. How will Microsoft crush these upstarts?
Re:microsoft behavior is the same as everyone else
on
Microsoft vs. Burst.com
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What I'm trying to communicate isn't about Marx and Engels. Communism was not invented to do anything good for the worker, or to form any sort of utopia; rather, it was invented as a mechanism to change the world's balance of power. As Chairman Mao once said, "Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy."
Instead of communism what I think is worth looking at is Adam Smith's original vision of capitalism. As you likely know, Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations" which laid out the core principles of a capitalist system. However, Adam Smith's vision was not contained in this one book. Rather, Adam Smith always maintained that to build a sustainable and socially beneficial economic system that you needed the basic capitalist system ("Wealth of Nations", 1763) together with the moral system which he detailed in "Theory of Moral Sentiments", 1759.
Because Adam Smith was never able to integrate the two systems of theory that he laid out, morality and capitalism, into one integrated system, there has always been controversy on how to build a sustainable moral economic system. In "Theory of Moral Sentiments", Smith emphasizes that it is sympathy that is a fundamental human motive, while in "Wealth of Nations", Smith instead says the motive is "self-interest". Obviously there is much ground between these two sides of human nature.
Business places a large emphasis on having a strong legal system. As without such a system, many business transactions would cost more, or simply be impossible. It was the Common Law, and strict adherence to it, that enabled a new era of business to flourish. And the Common Law is based on a moral system, much of which was laid out in religious teachings. Thus we can see that morality is the foundation of easy, low-cost, flexible human collaboration and exchange. Put another way, without a strong legal system, based on our moral system, there is no foundation for a mutually beneficial society.
The world has seen how a ruthless amoral company like Microsoft has flourished in a societal and business environment that has no underlying moral foundation. No matter what the cost to the individual and to society, because of Microsoft's monopoly, we are forced to pay the Microsoft tax. Not merely do we have to pay the tax, but in our brief lives, we also suffer the cost of the dearth of innovation that exists under the shadow of a monopoly. And it is not just Microsoft, but nearly all companies that extract money from their customers and deliver far less value than was promised. And today's governments deliver just a miniscule fraction of every tax dollar back to the people in the form of tangible goods and services. The rest disappears because of corruption.
I offer the aside that as mainstream people, we don't even have accurate concepts for the "cost" of anything as the amoral capitalist system pushes the bulk of real costs into either or both of the "tomorrow" and "other people" columns. Without the ability to see how much things really cost, the mainstream person cannot make rational decisions, nor will their decisions be moral.
Needless to say, we see in today's world that there is an ever increasing growth of corruption. This increase is due to the fact that the business world and legal system have dropped nearly all adherence to a moral system. Everything is amoral money-centric self-interest. And thus we end up with a corrupt system, an inefficient system, large-scale society ills and the widespread looting that is going on today. Ever wonder how Microsoft is accumulating cash so fast? Immoral monopoly pricing certainly helps. And the energy companies make Microsoft look like a beginner. Furthermore, because there is no care for the welfare of our fellow human beings, nor even any care for Nature herself, we have created vast environmental problems that have a profound negative effect on th
That still doesn't change the fact that Apple apparently delayed tens of thousands of G5 shipments for a month, making other companies and individuals all wait just to please this one university. If I had lost my place in the queue, I wouldn't be happy having to wait longer for a machine I likely ordered three months ago.
Now what maybe true is that because these machines are going into a cluster, they don't care about cosmetic problems with a patched case door and they don't care if AGP 8X doesn't work right for high-performance 3D cards. So Apple could be dumping 1100 "good for clusters" machines on the university while waiting for an inline revision of the first batch of G5's. That makes more sense.
And you know... I'm quite glad I took an honest Apple employee's advice and don't have to worry about this stuff. Come January (Feburary is what I put on the calendar), I'll have a G5 with some of the bugs worked out and for less money.
microsoft behavior is that same as everyone else
on
Microsoft vs. Burst.com
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft is acting the same way every business in the USA acts. Small businesses are certainly not held to any greater standard. Having been to court a number of times for small business bankruptcy proceedings, it is very common for a small business to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad loans, employee theft, and via other very suspicious actions or incidents. And then of course, because of a break-in, plumbing leak, or other calamity, it is quite normal for the business to have ZERO records of what happened to the money.
Even listening to the most amazing stories about what happened to huge amounts of moeny, the Federal bankruptcy agent doesn't even look up. He's heard it all before so many times, it's the same old shit. Everybody lies.
I don't suppose you read about any Enron executives going to jail recently, did you? Of course not. What Enron did is no different than what every big corporation does. Some are just better than others and if you steal too much at the wrong time, the house of cards can fall down. Executives don't go to jail for stealing. Can you imagine a trial of executives by their peers -- other executives? "Well, Kenny, you should have used my guys to set up your fake accounts. You wouldn't have been found out for another couple years and you could have paid Ashcroft his cut and moved the rest of the money to a good bank in Grand Cayman by then."
Maybe these standards of culpability that you are referring to only exist in your head? There is certainly not much evidence in the real world of anything that resembles "business morality". Almost every business in the USA is crooked. With a giant overbearing government that has a bloodthirst for taking your money and then returning less than 4 cents on each tax dollar, would a rational being expect anything else? If it's okay for the government to lie, cheat, and steal, why should a small business, big business, investor, or anyone else do different?
If you unplug from the morality that is taught to worker units so they are obedient and efficient, you'll be in for a major wake-up call. Your job is to work and pay your taxes, that is all. And good workers are moral workers. Keeps costs down and profits up. All around you, the country is being looted. The workers are going to wake up one day and realize they are fucked because they've been robbed blind while they've had their faces glued to their television sets, absorbing the latest disinformation from the media and the government.
According to Apple, there were "over 100,000" pre-orders for the G5. Now this includes single processor models, but the university's alleged order of 1100 machines is not going to make a big impact on everyone else.
Besides, the real reason that Apple's machines are late is case defects and AGP problems, amongst other issues that Apple has not been forthright about. At the keynote an honest Apple employee told me the machines wouldn't ship until October as there were many little problems and I should wait for the January refresh so I don't get a flaky machine.
And one has to wonder why anyone building a cluster would build it using desktop machines and not use the forthcoming G5 rackmount machines from Apple and IBM... which is supposed to include a quad-processor from IBM.
That's a great link on carcinogens. I looked up celery and found that as with most natural carcinogens, its risk is far less than that of manmade carcinogens.
Specifically, celery is 20,000 times less dangerous than the #1 carcinogen on the list, manmade ethylene dibromide (EDB). One of the uses of EBD is as a pesticide for fruits and grains.
As you can see from this publication by the EPA concering EBD. Note there is no report from the EPA on "caffeic acid" that I could find. As a separate substance, not in any natural form, caffeic acid has been shown to be a RODENT carcinogen. In caffeic acid's natural forms that humans digest (coffee, apples, plums, pears, lettuce, potatoes and celery), it has not been shown to be a carcinogen. The daily dose of caffeic acid for most people is a small fraction of the carcinogenic dosage for rats.
Short-term: EPA has found EDB to potentially cause the following health effects when people are exposed to it at levels above the MCL for relatively short periods of time: damage to the liver, stomach, and adrenal glands, along with significant reproductive system toxicity, particularly the testes.
Long-term: EDB has the potential to cause the following effects from a lifetime exposure at levels above the MCL: damage to the respiratory system, nervous system, liver, heart, and kidneys; cancer.
You can go down the list from the link you posted and realize that ALL the top dangers are from manmade chemicals.
All I can ask is people take the effort to THINK. Most of these exceedingly carcinogenic and dangerious manmade chemicals were put into the environment without much care or study. Much the same thing is happening with nanotechnology today. Haven't we learned any sort of lesson?
Thank you for taking the time and patience to educate me on natural carcinogens. I do walk away with a greater understanding of how man-made substances are so deadly compared to what is found in the natural world.
I cannot argue with someone who thinks water is toxic. By any definition of the word toxic with relation to life on Earth, water does not fit. Water enables just about every form of life on Earth to live. Hence, by definition it is not toxic. If you wish to twist basic facts around so much, you are living for the argument and not for what matters -- a clean and healthy environment.
For anyone to believe wholeheartedly that all the pesticides and other chemicals we have put into the ecosystem -- which have been proven to be harmful to many species of life including humans -- are good, they must have a vested interest in the chemical industry. Either that or are in major denial about the hundreds of environmental studies that are published every year regarding the dangerous levels of chemical pollution in the environment.
As I wrote in a different post on this thread, a mountain of celery is typically not considered toxic just because there are ingredients in plants that INSECTS do not like. Note that nibbling on a plant typically doesn't KILL the insect, just discourage it from eating more.
If anything, Man is at fault for making any natural plant proteins into poison via genetic engineering -- i.e. getting particular genes to express them 1000X so they can make and sell "organic" plants which are indeed carcinogenic. The non gene engineered version of the plant is not toxic to humans.
Looking back on the thread, I find it is just another case of trying to have a discussion with two people at different knowledge levels. I'm not saying better/worse or offering insult, just that there is often too big of a knowledge gap to have a worthwhile conversation. If you haven't read the environmental reports, you don't understand how much damage man-made toxins have done to the ecosystem and to man himself.
1. Of, relating to, or caused by a toxin or other poison: a toxic condition; toxic hepatitis.
2. Capable of causing injury or death, especially by chemical means; poisonous: food preservatives that are toxic in concentrated amounts; a dump for toxic industrial wastes. See Synonyms at poisonous.
Using this simple definition, and noting the fact that we do have a vibrant living ecosystem, it can't be all full of toxins as your original premise asserted.
"The act authorizes EPA to secure information on all new and existing chemical substances and to control any of these substances determined to cause an unreasonable risk to public health or the environment."
Note the use of the word "chemical". The bulk of the usage of "toxic" is to describe man-made chemicals. Hence the term "toxic waste" and the fact that it doesn't usually apply to a big mound of celery which has inherent anti-insect proteins.
Of course living things produce toxins. We've got snake venom, spider poison, etc. These natural toxins are toxic because they produce injury/death.
For the most part in today's world, however, the bulk of what is toxic to man in the environment has been created by man. Many more people die of man-made illnesses than are killed by natural toxins. And I include poisoned and broken ecosystems here. The crazy use of chemicals in the environment has thrown many ecosystems out of kilter, creating giant problems. Without Man's stupid intervention, Nature had been self-regulating for millions of years. We'll be lucky if human life lasts as we know it for another 100 years.
The definition of TOXIC, so you can stop TWISTING its use:
"Capable of causing injury or death, especially by chemical means; poisonous: food preservatives that are toxic in concentrated amounts; a dump for toxic industrial wastes. See Synonyms at poisonous."
The natural defense mechanisms found in plants cannot be classified as toxic because they seldom cause injury or death in their natural form.
Yes there are a few plants that if eaten raw will cause problems for people. But contrast that with the innumerable chemicals that man has put into the environment, nearly all of which will cause death if ingested in a very small quantity.
For the living world to support LIFE, one cannot call it TOXIC. The very assertion is non-sensical.
Defending poisonous chemicals put into the environment is really stupid, usually the sign of someone with a death wish or on a major greed trip. We live because of a balance in the ecosystem that has existed for a long time before us. Destroying this balance runs a large risk of destroying ourselves.
Look what we've done to the world in the small time the industrial age has existed. At this rate, we will have destroyed our planet's ability to support many forms of life (I'm not talking bacteria here) in the span of hundreds of years. No doubt Nature considers human beings to be TOXIC.
I find it absolutely ludicrous that you say the environment is full of natural toxins. Such as what? The amount of man-made toxic substances put into the environment so completely dwarfs the miniscule amounts of natural toxic substances, there is no real comparison. Most water on the planet has become toxic only because of man.
You are obviously a person who has a vested interest in the chemical industry.
There is a tremendous effort by chemical companies to produce studies that show pesticides are safe. Of course these studies are complete fabrication as is often shown years later. And thousands if not millions of broken lives later. Rather than beat the argument further into the ground, I see you have some motive to promote pesticides. If someone has an ulterior motive, there is nothing that will convince them that poison is indeed poison and that poison is dangerous and should not be spread into the environment willy nilly.
The synthetic pesticide DDT was widely used in urban aerial sprays to control urban mosquito, gypsy moth, Japanese beetle and other insects in the 1940's. By 1972, DDT was banned from the United States due to widespread development of resistance to DDT and evidence that DDT use was increasing preterm births and also harming the environment. DDT was found to cause behavioral anomalies and eggshell thinning in populations of bald eagles and peregrine falcons. Although DDT is banned in the US and many other countries, DDT continues to be manufactured and applied in underdeveloped nations where some of the US food supply is grown.
Dursban, one of the most common pesticide used in households, schools, hospitals and agriculture was banned in 2000 by the USEPA due to unacceptable health risk, especially to children. Toxicology studies have found that exposures to Dursban early in life may affect the function of the nervous system later in life, with possilbe links to changes in normal learning and behavior. Yet, six manufacturers in the US are allowed to continue making the chemical for use on foreign crops.
There are thousands of articles on the web about the toxicity of DDT to all life -- and yes, it is more harmful to some species than others.
If you don't believe DDT was banned for a good reason or that Dursban was banned for a good reason, then I have to conclude you are purposely blinding yourself to the realities of the world. Introducing vast quantities of toxins into our ecosystem is just plain stupid. As you can see with Dursban, there are incredibly harmful effects on human beings. All so chemical companies and farmers can have a higher profit vs. investing in organic gardening, hothouse farming, and other safer and cleaner methods of production.
I'm sure nano will end up the same way. Greedy nano producers will put out all sorts of crappy nano to make a profit and they will end up creating vast problems for the world. Whenever a world is run solely for monetary profit, everything smart about taking care of the world gets thrown out the window.
So many times it is not ignorance of what some harmful substance does, but corruption that allows it to be brought to market anyway.
Once it was thoroughly proven that DDT was extremely harmful to all forms of life, the chemical companies promptly focused on selling DDT outside the US. So that your food if it came from outside the US, would be toxic.
You know what? There is there so much food coming into the US from other countries that still use DDT, you are still eating toxic food today.
When it comes to technology that is as powerful as nano, it is simply foolish to not go slowly with it. One mistake and it could make DDT look like a vitamin pill.
All in all, mankind has been very foolish using technology and has destroyed much of the ecosystem that keeps man alive. It is starting to come back to haunt us. Let us hope we have learned our lessons and we slow down the destruction of our world.
Greenpeace has it right. We've got to slow down, get off the cocaine ride of big science and "the next big thing". The life of our planet depends on it.
The real story on viruses/virii is about the money.
Microsoft loves having a low security OS because it forces people to upgrade whenever Microsoft's security PR team issues a "fixed in the next version of Windows" press release. And that brings in money. Much more money than having to staff a few extra people and say "we're doing our best patching all the holes in Windows".
Symantec, Network Associates, IBM, and all the other security companies are making big time paper off of viruses and other security threats. In the early days of "scan", it was a common rumor that McAffee wrote the viruses as well as the virus scanner -- to the point "scan" was jokingly referred to as "scam".
So of course, a security site has an interview with some professor who comes up with some flim-flam about how viruses are good. It's called job security. Or buttering your bread. Whenever one sees such obvious collusion, the simple way to find the truth is to FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Whenever there is a giant multi-billion dollar business depending on virus writers you can bet your bottom dollar there will be virus writers. And professors saying how virus writers are good for you.
And when it comes to the validity of the professor's basic premise, only an idiot would get suckered in by such a stupid argument.
Pollution kills many beneficial organisms and makes an existing ecosystem weaker. Crime does the same thing.
Do people move to high crime areas to make themselves stronger? Or to high pollution areas? Life is finite; life is fragile; ecosystems are fragile, especially software. Viruses and other attacks take away precious resources from doing good things in life with the resources you have. It's simply a waste of resources to have to armor and protect every website/house/place of business to the point of absurdity.
What was okay a long time when there were fewer people does not make the same action valid today.
It adds up very fast now when you factor in a 6,000,000,000+ multiplier.
These researchers did not need to put a delicate deep sea ecosystem into danger. As I'm sure yoo have read, almost all (97%) of the fiber in the USA is NOT EVEN BEING USED. It was overbuilt. So rather than USE WHAT WE HAVE, it is better to go and plunder the sea and kill more sea life.
Finding new justifications to plunder nature is not moral, it's not even intelligent. We are putting the very ecosystem that sustains human life at risk because science has gone crazy and thinks they are masters of the universe. With global warming, pollution and the many other woes that face humanity due to industrialization, it is difficult not to think that science has been arrogant and foolhardy in their quest for knowledge.
There are now dietary consumption warnings for many large oceanfish due to the levels of mercury that they contain. Each too much tuna or swordfish and you will die.
China has poisoned a giant bay of nearly all sea life in their mad rush to industrialize, due to their dumping untreated waste into the bay.
As you know, many parts of the world have clothing requirements to go out into the sun due to lack of ozone.
You are fooling yourself if you think the environment is not in danger and that human beings are not dependent on the environment.
America is the largest polluter on the planet. And the recently backed out of the Kyoto agreement. Isn't it time America realized what they are doing to the planet? And took responsibility for it?
Once again, science finds more incredible magic that exists in nature.
And once again, science will likely lead to the extinction of this wonderful creature. We will now have sorts of divers capturing and killing every kind of sponge there is down there, all for the sake of profit. Who knows what brittle ecology we will stomp on by removing all these sponges?
"Life in the sea" is becoming more and more of an oxymoronic statement as vast regions of the underwater world become inhospitable due to pollution.
Too bad and too sad that Americans really don't care about the planet. They are the only ones with the power to change things. But the only god that the Americans have worshipped for a long time is Greed the Destroyer.
SCO is going to start suing those individuals and companies who are thinking about using Linux.
"Conspiracy to destroy value" something like that.
Pretty soon I would expect the rabid SCO dog to turn on its master (since Microsoft has that new Linux lab, an obvious sign of their evil intentions) and decide to go after Microsoft's $50 billion in cash.
Of course to get a copy of the Windows source code to look at, SCO would have to partner with a government... "SCO and Nigeria announce $1 trillion dollar lawsuit against Microsoft"
Slashdot Mirror
It is sometimes asserted that competition in a context of free trade and free circulation of capital is reactivating Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages, according to which wages will automatically tend to stabilise at the minimal subsistence level. This did not happen before now, as this reasoning goes, because, contrary to the assumption of Malthus, population growth was curbed in the societies experiencing the industrial revolution and workers were able to protect their interests, albeit through fierce struggle, riots, and revolutions. Subsequently, workers were able to organise themselves in trade-unions and political parties. Today, however, through free trade, the free circulation of capital and the resulting competition, workers and employees are in a global competitive situation with consequences not only for employment but also for wages and security. ...
A modern version of the Iron Law of Wages?
I think when you get all the data in front of you, it is easy to see that "globalization" benefits only the very wealthy.
Most studies have shown that "local economies" tend to be best for the people. Even the inventor of the Euro currency feels he made a big mistake and that the individual countries of Europe will ultimately be worse off with a unified currency vs. local currencies.
Local economies vs. global economies is not a capitalism vs. socialism issue. The Soviet Union (USSR) was a giant economy comprised of many countries, but it produced results that were incredibly bad for most people living in the USSR.
There is simply no human reason to embrace globalization. The frenzied greed to make as much profit as possible without any consideration of the means or the ultimate costs is pathological. If we weren't so concerned about profits, everyone would be better off.
The last people on earth to listen to (much less trust) regarding "what to do" with the lives and jobs of middle class Americans are the CEOs of the world's largest multi-national companies. These people care about the personal payoff for them, not much else.
Especially companies that have been firing US workers at a record pace. Extra especially CEOs such as Carly Fiorano who is known to be a technlogy illiterate beancounter whose only skill is to chop costs by chopping workers.
When USA CEOs move jobs offshore, the corporation is the only one that benefits. Profits go up as costs go down. The bulk of India's IT output goes to the US, it does not go to India. Similarly with China's industrial output. The only reason these countries get the big business from the USA is to increase profits of USA companies.
Corporate profits of US companies go mostly into various payoffs for CEOs, top management, and large institutional shareholders. For the many technology companies that do not pay dividends, there is no payoff for small shareholders.
It is no surprise that there are many US companies under investigation for conflicts of interest between shareholders and management.
So what happens when millions of middle class workers are fired from US companies and their jobs moved offshore?
As we have learned in other industries, once jobs are moved offshore, they never come back. A nation tends to lose entire industry segments. Witness the lack of manufacturing capability in the US today.
As the middle class shrinks, the economy will also shrink. However, having moved their production offshore, HP, Intel, and others can sacrifice the US middle class so that they can then sell products to the rapidly growing Indian and Chinese middle classes.
It is the US middle class worker, the biggest US taxpayer, that gets to support HP, Intel, and other USA corporations growing their profits and then ultimately this trusting middle class worker gets stabbed in the back.
As public companies on the US stock exchange, it is a major conflict of interest between shareholders (US people) and management (CEOs and their top lieutenants) to move jobs offshore.
It is my personal belief that any CEO of a US public company that offshores jobs should be fired immediately for conflict of interest and should be fully subject to criminal prosecution.
I make the distinction of a public company as shares have been sold to Americans under a set of promises and expectations. People invest in an American company to help build America, the lives of Americans, not just fill the pockets of a few greedy CEOs. By replacing US workers with foreign workers, the CEO of a US public corporation is in breach of contract with the shareholders.
Furthermore by breaching this contract, HP and other companies could be shown to be acting in "bad faith" versus the interests of their shareholders and the whole of America itself. The consequences of an American CEO breaking faith and betraying the people of America should be a long stay in prison.
I think the key point here is that there is a lot of DRM that ships with "Mac OS X", not just iTunes. I don't want to have to find a workaround for all sorts of little things because Apple includes DRM sprinkled all around their OS/apps.
As for what is an "OS" and what is not, everything I mentioned other than FCP ships with "Mac OS X". While in a technical sense, some of the DRM may not be in the OS kernel, it is still part of what the consumer considers the "OS". Because all of Mac OS X is not open source, we don't know what is in the shipping OS anyway.
Time will tell if Apple's strategy of making a small part of something similar to their OS open source will provide them with any market advantage.
So far, Apple has taken far more from the open source community than they have given back, so they are nothing more than a parasite.
In the Apple world, DRM, or digital rights management, is built into Apple digital hub products like iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, Quicktime, etc.
You might as well delete all "iLife", Quicktime, and all the other Apple software you use if you want to have a better chance of getting rid of DRM on Mac OS X.
There are many ways DRM pops its ugly head up on Mac. For instance, Apple decided not to enable screen captures so that you can't grab still frames of a DVD movie. Not even even your own DVD movie shot with your own camcorder.
And of course, if you don't have Apple's DRM system running, you cannot play back the MP4 AAC files you purchase from the iTunes store as they are encrypted and have DRM access controls.
When it comes to Darwin, Apple only released the code because Darwin is comprised of much open source code that likely has licensing requirements to maintain the openness of the code. I'm sure Apple likes all the free bug finding and fixing they get as well.
BTW, if you can prove that the shipping OS X is fully built from the published Darwin sources, by all means do so. I cannot do so, that is what I already said. Apple's website says "Many of the projects in the Darwin repository are the same live source trees used by Apple engineers for the Mac OS X product build." Which implies Darwin is not quite the same as shipping Mac OS X.
All in all, I believe I've been accurate in my comments regarding Apple and Mac OS X. Apple has a lot of DRM on their platform, not just iTunes. And Darwin is not totally the same code as Apple's Mac OS X.
Technically, the article was a good overview of the various bits and pieces of Mac OS X.
However, the article either skipped or provided very skimpy coverage of Apple's DRM system and the defacto closed source nature of Mac OS X.
The one gigantic difference between Linux/*BSD and OS X / Windows is that Linux and *BSD are *open source* while Mac OS X and Windows are *closed source*.
While there are a few pieces of Mac OS X that are open source, much of it is not. And as far as I have read, there is no way to know if what you run as Mac OS X was even built from the published Darwin sources.
Open source matters as without a full open source OS (and tool chain), an OS simply cannot be trusted. Much as there are many rumors of spyware in Windows (and some documented cases), the same sort of spyware is likely to be in Mac OS X as well. This is especially true given the environments in the western world, especially the USA and EU, with more and more draconian police state laws being passed every day.
I noticed the author didn't mention Apple's closed source DRM system, for instance. It doesn't exist in his model of Mac OS X. That was good for a chuckle. It is these sorts of externally managed and controlled "rights" systems that are most likely to invade a person's privacy and violate a person's legal and natural rights. I suppose the author didn't want to upset people with stuff they shouldn't know about...
Mac OS X certainly is a full-featured corporate OS. However, it will never be considered a trusted OS until it is fully open source. Unless a person is incredibly ingenuous, he cannot have unknown black box "digital prison management" software on his closed-source OS machine and think "yes, I trust this computer".
While opinions on the matter differ, I believe the big force driving the popularity of Linux is "trust". It is far easier to trust a product that is owned by an open community -- with everything that entails -- versus a product that is owned by a vendor whose sole goal is to bleed you for as much money as possible and return as little value to you as possible.
There is little doubt in anyone's mind that both Apple and Microsoft are out to take as much of your money as possible. Microsoft is a known monopoly with monopoly pricing and Apple is just a Mini-Me version of Microsoft, complete with their own monopoly pricing in their closed market. In an industry of low margins, Apple is legendary for their extremely high profit margins and how they respond to problems with their products only if you threaten them with drastic legal action.
It is easy to understand the author's personal preference, as a wealthy American, for Mac OS X. It works well, it looks reasonably good, and it's trendy in various American subcultures, from drug subculture, to music subculture, to the social elite subculture. So why not go with the trend? It seems like modern American culture, especially their foreign policy, management ethos, and environmental policy is "rip/mix/burn".
The great truth, though, is that Mac OS X it is not a healthy choice for the world, for humanity.
I often say "people may be ignorant, but mostly they are not stupid". And so, wisely, most people in the world avoid an expensive closed source OS from one of the world's greediest and most abusive corporations.
And while Windows users are captive under the power of a monopoly, slowly more and more of them are moving away from their closed source OS to the open source world.
There are many reasons that Apple's global market share is falling every year, but one of the most important is that even when you spend all the money it takes to buy into the Apple computing world (religion?), you still do not get a trusted computer.
Meanwhile the Linux world is getting closer and closer to giving people everything they need in "good enough" form, all in an open, trustworthy, and transparent manner.
Maybe Apple can ponder this as they wonder why -- with all that "insanely great" technology --- most people are deciding they really don't need to buy an expensive yet ultimately untrustable Mac.
As for public schools, they've been dumbing down American kids for a long time now. Charlotte Iserbyt's excellent book explains all --
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
If you read nothing else, read Charlotte's article, No American Left Alone. It's an eye opener --
Virtually every major consumer service provider is moving towards flat rate pricing. It is far simpler for the service provider and far simpler for the consumer. Not only is it simpler, it is also cheaper. The service provider saves a lot of money on billing which is priced as a function of complexity. Flat rate packages provide a great value for the consumer and also simplify the consumer's finances. There is good reason that millions of consumers are moving to flat rate service providers.
As a micropayment system is complex and costs a tremendous amount of money to implement, staff, and maintain, the consumer can expect costs to be higher when using this sort of system. I might add for emphasis that only a fool would think the higher costs are not going to be passed on to the consumer. Not to mention that the consumer now has to track their own actions on a minute scale that will take lots of time. Imagine instead of having one "pay per view" system to keep track of, you now have 17 "click per view" systems to worry about. It is like every channel on your satellite TV having its own pay-per-view system and account. It's not something many people would willingly sign up for, that's for sure.
So why do some companies want to buck the big flat rate trend in consumer pricing and create high complexity micropayment systems?
The answer is simple -- they want your money. With micropayments, a service provider gets your money up front, gets to keep your money in an account which generates float revenue, and is in the superb position of forcing the consumer to spend the money on potentially uninteresting things in order for the consumer to feel the money is not being wasted. Many micropayment systems have no way of getting your money out.
However, the biggest reason companies are pushing micropayments is that if they can shift the consumer's expectations to think "every time I do any little thing, I am going to pay", it will be a giant door opening to much higher prices for everything you do in life.
Check your ATM balance? Costs money. Press play three times on that song vs. once, costs extra money. The list will be endless. Micropayments are also a way to do an end run around "try before you buy". Instead of free song samples or free content samples, you'll be told "don't worry, it's micropayments."
The major banks have done large computer simulations and they have found they can make far more money using hard to understand variable cost transaction fees than they can using any sort of flat rate fee model. Now the banks are even more clever in that they combine the best of both worlds -- they package up seldom used services and charge a flat fee and then take more commonly used services and charge the variable rate transaction fee. Of course merchants will copy the banking system models and implement fee-based pricing that also allows you to go into negative dollars, so you will owe money. And don't forget the "micropayment account overdraft fee". Which will not be a micropayment, I guarantee you.
The heart of the matter is that micropayment systems are driven by greed. They are not driven by any desire to deliver value to the consumer. They are created to force a complex intermediary between the consumer and the service provider. The costs of this intermediary are significant and they are passed on to the consumer. The economic models that drive micropayments favor maximizing profits for the service provider.
All in all, micropayments are abuse waiting to happen. Consumers have avoided them like the plague for good reason. Though it's hard to believe, consumers want to hold on to their money. Pricing model studies have shown that they are tired of getting nickel and dimed to death. Consumers want clear value and the peace of mind that they can use a resource without the worry of variable fees sneaking up and biting them. No one has the discretionary money or discretionary time anymore to worry about the complexity of adding many new payment systems -- neither consumers nor service providers. Maybe one day in the future, micropayments will make sense. But I don't think that day is today.
The companies you mention all are perhaps more "evil" than Microsoft, but likely less ruthless as well. The record industry has fought for all sorts of heinous laws to punish their customers, the same as Microsoft has in the software industry (DMCA, NET Act, UCITA, etc.). Microsoft -- doing the same thing as the record industry -- has sent goons to Compaq and other OEMs when negotiations didn't go their way. Microsoft (a software monopoly) and the music industry (a content oligopoly) seem about the same in that they are both big companies that act ruthlessly and amorally.
If you took Microsoft and put them in any industry, they'd be the very worst that is tolerated in that particular industry. Don't make the mistake of thinking all industries are the same and can be compared equally. If Microsoft were a diamond mining company, I'm sure they'd have deathtraps galore. As it is, Microsoft is offshoring more and more jobs to slave labor countries. Is that any better?
Microsoft has gotten where they are by being absolutely ruthless. There is a reason that they have over half a billion dollars of court judgments pending against them with more in the works. The company is known for bending, twisting, and ignoring the law, stealing from their partners, stealing from their customers, and for many illegal acts in how they make contracts, structure business deals, spy on your information, etc.
It will be interesting to see how the backlash against the Microsoft Tax develops over the next 5-10 years. People, organizations, and countries will need alternatives to Microsoft simply to survive. How will Microsoft crush these upstarts?
Instead of communism what I think is worth looking at is Adam Smith's original vision of capitalism. As you likely know, Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations" which laid out the core principles of a capitalist system. However, Adam Smith's vision was not contained in this one book. Rather, Adam Smith always maintained that to build a sustainable and socially beneficial economic system that you needed the basic capitalist system ("Wealth of Nations", 1763) together with the moral system which he detailed in "Theory of Moral Sentiments", 1759.
Because Adam Smith was never able to integrate the two systems of theory that he laid out, morality and capitalism, into one integrated system, there has always been controversy on how to build a sustainable moral economic system. In "Theory of Moral Sentiments", Smith emphasizes that it is sympathy that is a fundamental human motive, while in "Wealth of Nations", Smith instead says the motive is "self-interest". Obviously there is much ground between these two sides of human nature.
Business places a large emphasis on having a strong legal system. As without such a system, many business transactions would cost more, or simply be impossible. It was the Common Law, and strict adherence to it, that enabled a new era of business to flourish. And the Common Law is based on a moral system, much of which was laid out in religious teachings. Thus we can see that morality is the foundation of easy, low-cost, flexible human collaboration and exchange. Put another way, without a strong legal system, based on our moral system, there is no foundation for a mutually beneficial society.
The world has seen how a ruthless amoral company like Microsoft has flourished in a societal and business environment that has no underlying moral foundation. No matter what the cost to the individual and to society, because of Microsoft's monopoly, we are forced to pay the Microsoft tax. Not merely do we have to pay the tax, but in our brief lives, we also suffer the cost of the dearth of innovation that exists under the shadow of a monopoly. And it is not just Microsoft, but nearly all companies that extract money from their customers and deliver far less value than was promised. And today's governments deliver just a miniscule fraction of every tax dollar back to the people in the form of tangible goods and services. The rest disappears because of corruption.
Needless to say, we see in today's world that there is an ever increasing growth of corruption. This increase is due to the fact that the business world and legal system have dropped nearly all adherence to a moral system. Everything is amoral money-centric self-interest. And thus we end up with a corrupt system, an inefficient system, large-scale society ills and the widespread looting that is going on today. Ever wonder how Microsoft is accumulating cash so fast? Immoral monopoly pricing certainly helps. And the energy companies make Microsoft look like a beginner. Furthermore, because there is no care for the welfare of our fellow human beings, nor even any care for Nature herself, we have created vast environmental problems that have a profound negative effect on th
Now what maybe true is that because these machines are going into a cluster, they don't care about cosmetic problems with a patched case door and they don't care if AGP 8X doesn't work right for high-performance 3D cards. So Apple could be dumping 1100 "good for clusters" machines on the university while waiting for an inline revision of the first batch of G5's. That makes more sense.
And you know... I'm quite glad I took an honest Apple employee's advice and don't have to worry about this stuff. Come January (Feburary is what I put on the calendar), I'll have a G5 with some of the bugs worked out and for less money.
Even listening to the most amazing stories about what happened to huge amounts of moeny, the Federal bankruptcy agent doesn't even look up. He's heard it all before so many times, it's the same old shit. Everybody lies.
I don't suppose you read about any Enron executives going to jail recently, did you? Of course not. What Enron did is no different than what every big corporation does. Some are just better than others and if you steal too much at the wrong time, the house of cards can fall down. Executives don't go to jail for stealing. Can you imagine a trial of executives by their peers -- other executives? "Well, Kenny, you should have used my guys to set up your fake accounts. You wouldn't have been found out for another couple years and you could have paid Ashcroft his cut and moved the rest of the money to a good bank in Grand Cayman by then."
Maybe these standards of culpability that you are referring to only exist in your head? There is certainly not much evidence in the real world of anything that resembles "business morality". Almost every business in the USA is crooked. With a giant overbearing government that has a bloodthirst for taking your money and then returning less than 4 cents on each tax dollar, would a rational being expect anything else? If it's okay for the government to lie, cheat, and steal, why should a small business, big business, investor, or anyone else do different?
If you unplug from the morality that is taught to worker units so they are obedient and efficient, you'll be in for a major wake-up call. Your job is to work and pay your taxes, that is all. And good workers are moral workers. Keeps costs down and profits up. All around you, the country is being looted. The workers are going to wake up one day and realize they are fucked because they've been robbed blind while they've had their faces glued to their television sets, absorbing the latest disinformation from the media and the government.
According to Apple, there were "over 100,000" pre-orders for the G5. Now this includes single processor models, but the university's alleged order of 1100 machines is not going to make a big impact on everyone else.
Besides, the real reason that Apple's machines are late is case defects and AGP problems, amongst other issues that Apple has not been forthright about. At the keynote an honest Apple employee told me the machines wouldn't ship until October as there were many little problems and I should wait for the January refresh so I don't get a flaky machine.
And one has to wonder why anyone building a cluster would build it using desktop machines and not use the forthcoming G5 rackmount machines from Apple and IBM... which is supposed to include a quad-processor from IBM.
Specifically, celery is 20,000 times less dangerous than the #1 carcinogen on the list, manmade ethylene dibromide (EDB). One of the uses of EBD is as a pesticide for fruits and grains.
As you can see from this publication by the EPA concering EBD. Note there is no report from the EPA on "caffeic acid" that I could find. As a separate substance, not in any natural form, caffeic acid has been shown to be a RODENT carcinogen. In caffeic acid's natural forms that humans digest (coffee, apples, plums, pears, lettuce, potatoes and celery), it has not been shown to be a carcinogen. The daily dose of caffeic acid for most people is a small fraction of the carcinogenic dosage for rats.
You can go down the list from the link you posted and realize that ALL the top dangers are from manmade chemicals.
All I can ask is people take the effort to THINK. Most of these exceedingly carcinogenic and dangerious manmade chemicals were put into the environment without much care or study. Much the same thing is happening with nanotechnology today. Haven't we learned any sort of lesson?
Thank you for taking the time and patience to educate me on natural carcinogens. I do walk away with a greater understanding of how man-made substances are so deadly compared to what is found in the natural world.
I cannot argue with someone who thinks water is toxic. By any definition of the word toxic with relation to life on Earth, water does not fit. Water enables just about every form of life on Earth to live. Hence, by definition it is not toxic. If you wish to twist basic facts around so much, you are living for the argument and not for what matters -- a clean and healthy environment. For anyone to believe wholeheartedly that all the pesticides and other chemicals we have put into the ecosystem -- which have been proven to be harmful to many species of life including humans -- are good, they must have a vested interest in the chemical industry. Either that or are in major denial about the hundreds of environmental studies that are published every year regarding the dangerous levels of chemical pollution in the environment. As I wrote in a different post on this thread, a mountain of celery is typically not considered toxic just because there are ingredients in plants that INSECTS do not like. Note that nibbling on a plant typically doesn't KILL the insect, just discourage it from eating more. If anything, Man is at fault for making any natural plant proteins into poison via genetic engineering -- i.e. getting particular genes to express them 1000X so they can make and sell "organic" plants which are indeed carcinogenic. The non gene engineered version of the plant is not toxic to humans. Looking back on the thread, I find it is just another case of trying to have a discussion with two people at different knowledge levels. I'm not saying better/worse or offering insult, just that there is often too big of a knowledge gap to have a worthwhile conversation. If you haven't read the environmental reports, you don't understand how much damage man-made toxins have done to the ecosystem and to man himself.
However, let's put aside the medical jargon for a moment and look at mainstream usage. I originally quoted the definition from the The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, published in 2000:
Using this simple definition, and noting the fact that we do have a vibrant living ecosystem, it can't be all full of toxins as your original premise asserted.
Now let's look at the law of the land, namely the Toxic Substances Control Act:
Note the use of the word "chemical". The bulk of the usage of "toxic" is to describe man-made chemicals. Hence the term "toxic waste" and the fact that it doesn't usually apply to a big mound of celery which has inherent anti-insect proteins.
Of course living things produce toxins. We've got snake venom, spider poison, etc. These natural toxins are toxic because they produce injury/death.
For the most part in today's world, however, the bulk of what is toxic to man in the environment has been created by man. Many more people die of man-made illnesses than are killed by natural toxins. And I include poisoned and broken ecosystems here. The crazy use of chemicals in the environment has thrown many ecosystems out of kilter, creating giant problems. Without Man's stupid intervention, Nature had been self-regulating for millions of years. We'll be lucky if human life lasts as we know it for another 100 years.
The definition of TOXIC, so you can stop TWISTING its use: "Capable of causing injury or death, especially by chemical means; poisonous: food preservatives that are toxic in concentrated amounts; a dump for toxic industrial wastes. See Synonyms at poisonous." The natural defense mechanisms found in plants cannot be classified as toxic because they seldom cause injury or death in their natural form. Yes there are a few plants that if eaten raw will cause problems for people. But contrast that with the innumerable chemicals that man has put into the environment, nearly all of which will cause death if ingested in a very small quantity. For the living world to support LIFE, one cannot call it TOXIC. The very assertion is non-sensical. Defending poisonous chemicals put into the environment is really stupid, usually the sign of someone with a death wish or on a major greed trip. We live because of a balance in the ecosystem that has existed for a long time before us. Destroying this balance runs a large risk of destroying ourselves. Look what we've done to the world in the small time the industrial age has existed. At this rate, we will have destroyed our planet's ability to support many forms of life (I'm not talking bacteria here) in the span of hundreds of years. No doubt Nature considers human beings to be TOXIC.
I find it absolutely ludicrous that you say the environment is full of natural toxins. Such as what? The amount of man-made toxic substances put into the environment so completely dwarfs the miniscule amounts of natural toxic substances, there is no real comparison. Most water on the planet has become toxic only because of man.
You are obviously a person who has a vested interest in the chemical industry.
There is a tremendous effort by chemical companies to produce studies that show pesticides are safe. Of course these studies are complete fabrication as is often shown years later. And thousands if not millions of broken lives later. Rather than beat the argument further into the ground, I see you have some motive to promote pesticides. If someone has an ulterior motive, there is nothing that will convince them that poison is indeed poison and that poison is dangerous and should not be spread into the environment willy nilly.
Dursban, one of the most common pesticide used in households, schools, hospitals and agriculture was banned in 2000 by the USEPA due to unacceptable health risk, especially to children. Toxicology studies have found that exposures to Dursban early in life may affect the function of the nervous system later in life, with possilbe links to changes in normal learning and behavior. Yet, six manufacturers in the US are allowed to continue making the chemical for use on foreign crops.
There are thousands of articles on the web about the toxicity of DDT to all life -- and yes, it is more harmful to some species than others.
If you don't believe DDT was banned for a good reason or that Dursban was banned for a good reason, then I have to conclude you are purposely blinding yourself to the realities of the world. Introducing vast quantities of toxins into our ecosystem is just plain stupid. As you can see with Dursban, there are incredibly harmful effects on human beings. All so chemical companies and farmers can have a higher profit vs. investing in organic gardening, hothouse farming, and other safer and cleaner methods of production.
I'm sure nano will end up the same way. Greedy nano producers will put out all sorts of crappy nano to make a profit and they will end up creating vast problems for the world. Whenever a world is run solely for monetary profit, everything smart about taking care of the world gets thrown out the window.
Synthetic Pesticides
So many times it is not ignorance of what some harmful substance does, but corruption that allows it to be brought to market anyway. Once it was thoroughly proven that DDT was extremely harmful to all forms of life, the chemical companies promptly focused on selling DDT outside the US. So that your food if it came from outside the US, would be toxic. You know what? There is there so much food coming into the US from other countries that still use DDT, you are still eating toxic food today. When it comes to technology that is as powerful as nano, it is simply foolish to not go slowly with it. One mistake and it could make DDT look like a vitamin pill. All in all, mankind has been very foolish using technology and has destroyed much of the ecosystem that keeps man alive. It is starting to come back to haunt us. Let us hope we have learned our lessons and we slow down the destruction of our world. Greenpeace has it right. We've got to slow down, get off the cocaine ride of big science and "the next big thing". The life of our planet depends on it.
The real story on viruses/virii is about the money.
Microsoft loves having a low security OS because it forces people to upgrade whenever Microsoft's security PR team issues a "fixed in the next version of Windows" press release. And that brings in money. Much more money than having to staff a few extra people and say "we're doing our best patching all the holes in Windows".
Symantec, Network Associates, IBM, and all the other security companies are making big time paper off of viruses and other security threats. In the early days of "scan", it was a common rumor that McAffee wrote the viruses as well as the virus scanner -- to the point "scan" was jokingly referred to as "scam".
So of course, a security site has an interview with some professor who comes up with some flim-flam about how viruses are good. It's called job security. Or buttering your bread. Whenever one sees such obvious collusion, the simple way to find the truth is to FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Whenever there is a giant multi-billion dollar business depending on virus writers you can bet your bottom dollar there will be virus writers. And professors saying how virus writers are good for you.
And when it comes to the validity of the professor's basic premise, only an idiot would get suckered in by such a stupid argument.
Pollution kills many beneficial organisms and makes an existing ecosystem weaker. Crime does the same thing.
Do people move to high crime areas to make themselves stronger? Or to high pollution areas? Life is finite; life is fragile; ecosystems are fragile, especially software. Viruses and other attacks take away precious resources from doing good things in life with the resources you have. It's simply a waste of resources to have to armor and protect every website/house/place of business to the point of absurdity.
Ugh. Corruption is just so smelly.
What was okay a long time when there were fewer people does not make the same action valid today.
It adds up very fast now when you factor in a 6,000,000,000+ multiplier.
These researchers did not need to put a delicate deep sea ecosystem into danger. As I'm sure yoo have read, almost all (97%) of the fiber in the USA is NOT EVEN BEING USED. It was overbuilt. So rather than USE WHAT WE HAVE, it is better to go and plunder the sea and kill more sea life.
Finding new justifications to plunder nature is not moral, it's not even intelligent. We are putting the very ecosystem that sustains human life at risk because science has gone crazy and thinks they are masters of the universe. With global warming, pollution and the many other woes that face humanity due to industrialization, it is difficult not to think that science has been arrogant and foolhardy in their quest for knowledge.
There are now dietary consumption warnings for many large oceanfish due to the levels of mercury that they contain. Each too much tuna or swordfish and you will die.
China has poisoned a giant bay of nearly all sea life in their mad rush to industrialize, due to their dumping untreated waste into the bay.
As you know, many parts of the world have clothing requirements to go out into the sun due to lack of ozone.
You are fooling yourself if you think the environment is not in danger and that human beings are not dependent on the environment.
America is the largest polluter on the planet. And the recently backed out of the Kyoto agreement. Isn't it time America realized what they are doing to the planet? And took responsibility for it?
Once again, science finds more incredible magic that exists in nature.
And once again, science will likely lead to the extinction of this wonderful creature. We will now have sorts of divers capturing and killing every kind of sponge there is down there, all for the sake of profit. Who knows what brittle ecology we will stomp on by removing all these sponges?
"Life in the sea" is becoming more and more of an oxymoronic statement as vast regions of the underwater world become inhospitable due to pollution.
Too bad and too sad that Americans really don't care about the planet. They are the only ones with the power to change things. But the only god that the Americans have worshipped for a long time is Greed the Destroyer.
Well, it's easy to see how he got a job at Microsoft.
He must have passed the "I am completely devoid of morals and ethics" test with flying colors.
SCO is going to start suing those individuals and companies who are thinking about using Linux.
"Conspiracy to destroy value" something like that.
Pretty soon I would expect the rabid SCO dog to turn on its master (since Microsoft has that new Linux lab, an obvious sign of their evil intentions) and decide to go after Microsoft's $50 billion in cash.
Of course to get a copy of the Windows source code to look at, SCO would have to partner with a government...
"SCO and Nigeria announce $1 trillion dollar lawsuit against Microsoft"