That isn't a moral imperative, that's a fiscal imperative. But fiscal duty can and must take a back seat to moral imperative, otherwise you can justify virtually anything by saying "I had a duty to the shareholders...".
A corporation only has a fiscal and legal imperatives. The duty of corporation is to be as profitable as possible, while doing it legally. And actually even that legal imperative is ultimately about money, ie if paying fines and accepting the PR problems is more profitable than doing things legally then why not? A corporation can't be assumed to be able afford to think about "moral" perspective, since inevitably anoother company that does not concern itself with morality will appear and the moral company will go under. At least that's the theory, and the entire point of free market, that the most efficient one survives.
Then it's the duty of lawmakers (and consumers/customers) to make sure the corporations are not allowed to do "bad things". Or more precisely, that doing "bad things" is unprofitable both for the company, and for the individual persons doing the decisions.
Well, of course it does! Everything has to do with morality.
From purely capitalistic point of view, the moral thing to do is to maximize profits in short term, while ensuring the survival and profitability of the company in the long term. These are often the same thing (long term survival probably being more important if there's a conflict between these), as not trying to maximize short-term profits can easily lead to going bankrupt unless long-term prospects are good enough to attract risk capital anyway...
So actually it would be immoral (towards shareholders etc) to *not* do things the most profitable way. Demanding companies to be patriotic is just another form of communism, and inevitably leads to same kind of inefficiency.
It's quite ok to vote with your money and buy from companies that are patriotic even if their products are more expensive, but it's entirely different (and quite uncapitalistic and anti-free market) thing to criticize companies that do offshore outsourcing to get competitive advantage.
If you make your word drawing a "drawing" (insert|picture|drawing) it resizes as well as an embedded powerpoint presentation, with less bloat. It's the same drawing engine after all.
Hmm... Yeah... Except Word did not support connectors properly, IIRC. May have changed in more current versions, but I'm pretty sure at least Word97 didn't have that, and only way to have connectors was to embed Powerpoint object.
So MS dominates the office software market becuase people really need the functionality they offer, right? After all why would anyone want to use something lightweight with a clean UI (like Lyx for example) which makes you use another application just to draw a diagram?
I have not checked out what Lyx can do these days, but MS Word-Powerpoint integration is practically seamless. You see what the PP object looks like in Word, and you can edit it in place or double-click to open separate PP window.
Oh, and it works as well in OpenOffice, but then it's almost as as bloated as Word...
Can Lyx do that? It should... And with open source, it should be trivial to make it so too. "Insert Dia drawing" to create a dia drawing, double click to open dia to edit it, then whenever you save in dia it automatically converts the file to eps for Lyx. And saves all separate files inside one document file, so you can easily transport entire document wihtout worrying about losing parts of it.
User should not need to be concerned with details like opening a graphics editor, creating a picture, converting it to eps and then inserting that eps to the final document, and if he needs to change the picture later, he again needs to open the drawing program separately, find the drawing file, edit, and convert to eps again... Doing all that with Makefiles for example is fine if you're a programmer, but if you're just an user, everything should integrate into one frontend UI, which would take care of it all.
And same goes for graphics. Never ever use MS Word drawing functions for, well, for anything really. You can never be quite sure what happens if you for example resize the image... Or type more text into a textbox... Or breathe...
Always insert Powerpoint slide into the document. Unless you really need something Powerpoint can't do of course, in which case you should use whatever actual drawing program you need to.
Oh come on. It could also happen so that he'll train, get on a rocket, and get blown into fine red mist... Without this article, it wouldn't be possible to link back to this on the article telling about the accident. It may seem pointless now, but so do most precautionary things...
Copyright and patent are two completely different beasts. You don't apply for copyright, it's implicit. You have to specifically state that something you own copyright of is public domain, if you want to give up your copyright.
Also, the facts aren't copyrighted, it's the collection of facts, that particular representation of them. You could write down the same facts yourself and create identical database if you wanted to (of course in that case you'd better be prepared to prove it was not a copy even though it is identical...).
Re:What about other carbon arrangements?
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's mighty light mice you've got there...
Remember that 0.5mg is 0.0005g is 0.0000005kg, and mice probably weight in the range of 5-10g. So you seem to have an error of 3 decimal places, it's a bit under 0.01% of body weight that the mice inhaled, not 1%...
With that in mind imagine the mutant ape with a small jaw, suddenly the physical barrier that stops normal ape brain growth is removed and the brain keeps growing all in a single generation. I'm sure we had more brain evolution to do, but it seems possible that there could be enough of an advantage to offset the weaker jaw.
I wonder if the same thing could be applied to a dolphin, that already has a big brain, which I believe is mostly to process sound, to make their sonar to work.
So take away a dolphin's sonar (make it almost deaf) from birth, then give it reason to be smart, and stimulate it's intelligence to human direction. Could it learn to talk, for example through computer with dolphin "speech" recognition? Ie it would be taught to communicate with human language, reading text from screen (or with "speech" synthesis) and entering it by "speaking" (dolphin sounds, but human language).
(And then the porn industry learns about this, and the next thing you know, there are real live hot dolphin sex chats in the internet, with live image feed...;-)
The conclusion that this mutation was responsible for the divergence of humans and apes is just plain wrong.
It is, however, one of the many hundreds of mutations that led to the differentiation of us from primate brethren. In that respect, it's an interesting find.
One of the many yes, but perhaps the crucial one, meaning that without it, with different mutations but not just that one, there would have been just another species of apes, no technological civilization (above sticks and stones, the level apes have been for millions of years, only humans being able to advance beyond that).
It could have been a chain reaction, something like, change in jaw muscles gave more room to the brain, and at the same time gave evolutionary advantage to increased intelligence (compensating for weaker jaws). Without it, human intelligence might not have appeared at all, no matter what other mutations would have happened. With some other mutations in addition to that one, there would be different "humans" than us, but without that one mutation, there might be nobody.
Sure, the conclusion may be wrong because, well, that's not how it happened, but not because it's somehow not possible for single mutation to be critical. So as far as I can see, it can easily be completely true, too.
That's the type of thing I could see someone ordering even if they had absolutely no intention of purchasing the advertised car, just because they're fascinated by high-end cars. (I don't know anything about said 350Z, maybe it sucks, but I believe my point is clear)
I'm not sure if you are you saying that a commercial like that and sending out DVDs is a waste of money or not, but in any case it's not so. Quite the opposite...
Because I bet that most owners of a high-end cars (well, excluding those who were born rich and had a high-end sports car as their 16 year birthday present) had absolutely no intention of wasting money on one originally... But what do you know, people change their minds about stuff like this. First a marketing DVD, then a test drive, you know, just for the kicks, and then...;-)
Well, it's not a drawing program in any meaning of the word so in that respect it's not a replacement for MS Paint, but for pasting & saving screenshot (which all this supposedly is about) it probably is better.
Well, when it's generically said that "MS Paint blows", I think it's about more than just screenshots.
Even when talking about screenshots, MS Paint allows one to easily add a piece of text and an arrow pointing at a feature, something I myself need quite often when I need to take a screenshot (which is not often at all).
The point being, MS Paint is a nifty little program for a lot of purposes, and generally speaking it does not blow. It does what it does well enough, quickly and without crashing, even on older hardware. If "what it does" doesn't include what you need, it just means it's the wrong program for the purpose, not that it blows.
Checked it out (google irfanview), and it looks like a good replacement for "Imaging for Windows", not for MS Paint. Looks like a good piece of software though.
Anyone who admits to using MS Paint for screenshots is a moron.
Anyone who downloads and install GIMP just to take and print one screenshot is a moron. Even anyone (with average computer) who just starts GIMP to take and print one screenshot, then closes it, is a moron.
(Ok, actually they're not morons, they're just slightly clueless, but since you used the word...;-)
Now don't get me wrong, GIMP is IMHO one of the most spectacular examples of what open source can do, truly a great piece of software. But MS Paint is actually quite a brilliant little program for some specific tasks, and comparing it to GIMP is like comparing Busybox vi to emacs. I'd go as far as to say that Paint one of the best, most useful programs MS has ever created. What ever happened to "small is beutiful"?
That's such a horribly stupid argument. Are we then obligated to produce as many children as possible just because we can?
No. And I'm not saying that we should eat meat just before we can either. I'm saying that not eating meat does not make one more (or less) "moral" person, and that killing for food, in itself, is not unethical.
There are a lot of reasons to avoid eating meat (like ecological reason, meat production taking up much more land area per amount of food produced etc), and I definitely don't like horrible living conditions of animals in modern "industrialized" meat production either. But I don't really understand the thinking that killing animals for food is in principle unethical, IMHO that's being a bit too "civilized", a bit too detached from nature and facts of life.
It's in no way cruel to decide not to force these animals to be born... it is cruel to kill them (and before their time too).
I don't really see the distinction. To alter famous lyrics,
Is it better
To have lived and died,
Than never to have lived at all?
What about the animals that would have been born naturally in their natural populations and environments? Those specific genetic combinations? By forcing these food stock animals to be born, those free animals are not born. The difference is that these food stock animals live their lives captive and are murdered brutally.
Considering our modern way of life and what it is doing to our planet, I don't think there would have been many naturally born animals taking the place of ones grown by us humans...
And about brutality, I'd say that in nature most animals die far more brutally than in normal human food (meat) production. First starvation, then disease, then being captured and ripped apart by a predator, leaving it's young to starve to death unless another predator finds them first...
We've become so civilized that we no longer need to make or even see brutal actions ourselves, that we've lost perspective on issues like this. Current thinking often seems to be "evil usually involves brutal and cruel things, so everything that is brutal and cruel must be evil". And as a result you have stuff like a lot of people thinking that eating meat is in itself wrong.
How is it that you believe that if an animal isn't existing for food, then it wouldn't exist at all? What about all the animals at the top of the food chain over the eons?
I'm talking about individual animals. Take that bull on a field (or in a "meat factory", or where ever). If that animal was not being grown for food, it would not exist. It wouldn't have ever had a chance to be born, even. That particular animal would not exist. And, given the finite resources of earth, no other animal would exist in it's place either (it'd be used for growing plants, or industry, or whatever).
In other words, deciding that animals should not be grown and killed for food is deciding that they are better of not existing at all. I'm not so sure that's a decision that allows you to take moral high ground...
I can think of a few examples, but the one I'm most familiar with is vegetarianism and compassion for other forms of life.
I'm an atheist and a vegetarian. I think it's cruel to kill animals for food, especially when it's not even necessary to eat meat and be healthy (heck, it's even healthier to NOT eat meat).
But so many times I would have an argument about this with a christian... and what do they end up resorting to? "The Bible says God put animals here for us to do with as we want."
In this example, people actually use their belief in a higher power to be less moral.
First, I'm an atheist too, and there definitely can be moral without "higher power".
I just have to disagree with your point of killing animals for food. If that animals was not going to be killed for food, it would not exist at all. IMHO it's more moral to allow something to exist for it's life, before dying (which, with animals at least, almost always equates to being killed by another creature).
Now, having huge "meat factories" with abysmal living conditions for animals is entirely another matter, and I can easily see that as justification for boycotting entire meat industry. Also health reasons are one good reason to not eat meath.
But generally saying that "killing animals for food is bad" is same as saying "those animals don't have a right to exist at all".
The problem is not legal status, it is that current law (as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the late 1800s) makes a corporation the legal equivalent of a person. Therefore corporations have the same rights as you or I (except voting and campaign contibutions). They have rights of free speech, lobbying, owning other corporations. Trouble is, they don't have the same responsibilities. Wasn't Ford found guilty of negligent homicide (exploding Pintos) in the 1980s? Did Ford go to jail?
Ah, ok, then we've been talking about slightly different issue. Yeah, giving a corporation about same legal status as a person sounds a bit... strange, to put it kindly (I'm not American). I took the original statement in this thread ("companies should not have any special legal status") to mean something completely different...
Well in that case companies should not have any special legal status.
So imagine a factory jointly owned by 10 people, and having 100 people working in it doing whatever that takes a 100 people do effectively. The factory pollutes a river, killing all the fish in it etc. Some of the owners didn't even know about it happening.
Now who is responsible and expected to pay up? Is it the owners? Is it the workers who actually performed the actions polluting the river? And responsible for how much money? If somebody should go to jail, then who would that be? Just answering these questions gives the company a legal status, defining the responsibilites in such an event. There are a lot of different issues (another example, if a factory owner dies, what happens to the factory?) that need to be defined, and defining them gives them legal status. And if there's no clear definitions, that makes the system wide open for corruption.
Incidentally I just realised that the idea of companies being bad for capitalism (which I just thought of) is probably similar to my long held belief that giving special status to groups of politicians (i.e.: political parties) (for instance with the concept of governments) is what makes pseudo-representative (US/UK-style) democracy undemocratic.
I think I kind of agree with you here. Making political parties, permanent political organizations, illegal might actually accomplish something. You'd be voting for an individual and his manifesto, then he'd be free to make whatever connections with other representatives during his term... In modern information society that might actually work in a productive way, voters easily finding out what his representative said before elections and what he actually did during his term, and then being able to decide if he'd still vote for him, etc.
Too bad that the political parties have the power, and they'll never allow something like this...
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make about American Indians.
The point was that a society that falls behind in innovation and technology gets destroyed by others. What would limit innovation more than preventing things that require a lot people, money and organization, ie a company (private in capitalism, state-owned in communism)?
Capitalism is about allowing capital to be gathered from many persons to accomplish things that are more expensive than one person could ever hope to be able to afford. If everything had to be accomplished by one person, not a lot would be accomplished... As soon as you have just two people doing something together, you have a company, wether it has a legal status or not. As soon as you have something jointly owned by more than one person, you have some kind of a company. You're not planning to make owning things together illegal, are you?
Another purpose of a company is shared risk. If people would have to risk everything for anything they do, not a lot would get accomplished.
And there's a reason why you might want to have a lot accomplished. For example ancient American Indians probably didn't really have the concept of a company as we know it, and their society probably worked quite nicely too, until the Europeans came and slaughtered them in the process of the birth of the USA...
Does it disturb anyone how much effort is put into building robots designed for distruction? I mean I understand building robots that solve puzzles, and robots that overcome obstacles, but the idea of designing robots primarily for violence kind of bothers me.
It's human nature. You know, same thing that makes huge explosions etc in "big" Hollywood movies a must, the same thing that gives most people immense satisfaction when they kill their best friend in an online FPS, same thing that makes a.44 Magnum the most fun way to destroy your old hard disks...
Power, man, POWER! Slaughter their men and children, rape their women and then bring the best of them home as slaves! RaaaaAAAH! . . ....uh, so actually building robots that try to destroy each others is rather a constructive hobby, I think.
If you just don't get it, you're probably emotinally more female than male;-). Mind you, that's not at all a bad thing in the modern society, quite the opposite...
Europe still has their head up their ass regardless of what they think. Demanding they include other companies inferior products with their media player. Where will it stop? Word processors, mspaint, calc, IE (where's the browsers?), DUN, IIS, etc.
In my opinion, if an application is about controlling something else, such as media content, then it either should be fully standards-compliant, or not bundled. So, from your list, IE is pretty much the only product that should get more attention, in addition to Windows Media Player. Oh, and obiviously same principle should apply to Apple too, they shouldn't be allowed to ship integrated browser that is not standards compliant.
MS Office is also a de-facto standard, and should be forced to open the file formats, but it's not bundled with Windows, so slightly different issue.
To put it bluntly, any software product that has over 50% market share should be forced to fully open their file formats etc, for example by being completely standards compliant, or fully documenting anything that is not.
And, if you're defeating an encryption scheme to try to use your "backup copy" in an emulator, now you've really got yourself on the wrong side of the DMCA.
I'd say that gets you to the *right* side of DMCA...
Considering what DMCA implies, being in the legal side of it is definitely the wrong side to be in. Unless you want your country to turn into corporate oligarchy, of course....
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A corporation only has a fiscal and legal imperatives. The duty of corporation is to be as profitable as possible, while doing it legally. And actually even that legal imperative is ultimately about money, ie if paying fines and accepting the PR problems is more profitable than doing things legally then why not? A corporation can't be assumed to be able afford to think about "moral" perspective, since inevitably anoother company that does not concern itself with morality will appear and the moral company will go under. At least that's the theory, and the entire point of free market, that the most efficient one survives.
Then it's the duty of lawmakers (and consumers/customers) to make sure the corporations are not allowed to do "bad things". Or more precisely, that doing "bad things" is unprofitable both for the company, and for the individual persons doing the decisions.
Well, of course it does! Everything has to do with morality.
From purely capitalistic point of view, the moral thing to do is to maximize profits in short term, while ensuring the survival and profitability of the company in the long term. These are often the same thing (long term survival probably being more important if there's a conflict between these), as not trying to maximize short-term profits can easily lead to going bankrupt unless long-term prospects are good enough to attract risk capital anyway...
So actually it would be immoral (towards shareholders etc) to *not* do things the most profitable way. Demanding companies to be patriotic is just another form of communism, and inevitably leads to same kind of inefficiency.
It's quite ok to vote with your money and buy from companies that are patriotic even if their products are more expensive, but it's entirely different (and quite uncapitalistic and anti-free market) thing to criticize companies that do offshore outsourcing to get competitive advantage.
Hmm... Yeah... Except Word did not support connectors properly, IIRC. May have changed in more current versions, but I'm pretty sure at least Word97 didn't have that, and only way to have connectors was to embed Powerpoint object.
I have not checked out what Lyx can do these days, but MS Word-Powerpoint integration is practically seamless. You see what the PP object looks like in Word, and you can edit it in place or double-click to open separate PP window.
Oh, and it works as well in OpenOffice, but then it's almost as as bloated as Word...
Can Lyx do that? It should... And with open source, it should be trivial to make it so too. "Insert Dia drawing" to create a dia drawing, double click to open dia to edit it, then whenever you save in dia it automatically converts the file to eps for Lyx. And saves all separate files inside one document file, so you can easily transport entire document wihtout worrying about losing parts of it.
User should not need to be concerned with details like opening a graphics editor, creating a picture, converting it to eps and then inserting that eps to the final document, and if he needs to change the picture later, he again needs to open the drawing program separately, find the drawing file, edit, and convert to eps again... Doing all that with Makefiles for example is fine if you're a programmer, but if you're just an user, everything should integrate into one frontend UI, which would take care of it all.
And same goes for graphics. Never ever use MS Word drawing functions for, well, for anything really. You can never be quite sure what happens if you for example resize the image... Or type more text into a textbox... Or breathe...
Always insert Powerpoint slide into the document. Unless you really need something Powerpoint can't do of course, in which case you should use whatever actual drawing program you need to.
Oh come on. It could also happen so that he'll train, get on a rocket, and get blown into fine red mist... Without this article, it wouldn't be possible to link back to this on the article telling about the accident. It may seem pointless now, but so do most precautionary things...
Copyright and patent are two completely different beasts. You don't apply for copyright, it's implicit. You have to specifically state that something you own copyright of is public domain, if you want to give up your copyright.
Also, the facts aren't copyrighted, it's the collection of facts, that particular representation of them. You could write down the same facts yourself and create identical database if you wanted to (of course in that case you'd better be prepared to prove it was not a copy even though it is identical...).
That's mighty light mice you've got there...
Remember that 0.5mg is 0.0005g is 0.0000005kg, and mice probably weight in the range of 5-10g. So you seem to have an error of 3 decimal places, it's a bit under 0.01% of body weight that the mice inhaled, not 1%...
I wonder if the same thing could be applied to a dolphin, that already has a big brain, which I believe is mostly to process sound, to make their sonar to work.
So take away a dolphin's sonar (make it almost deaf) from birth, then give it reason to be smart, and stimulate it's intelligence to human direction. Could it learn to talk, for example through computer with dolphin "speech" recognition? Ie it would be taught to communicate with human language, reading text from screen (or with "speech" synthesis) and entering it by "speaking" (dolphin sounds, but human language).
(And then the porn industry learns about this, and the next thing you know, there are real live hot dolphin sex chats in the internet, with live image feed...
It is, however, one of the many hundreds of mutations that led to the differentiation of us from primate brethren. In that respect, it's an interesting find.
One of the many yes, but perhaps the crucial one, meaning that without it, with different mutations but not just that one, there would have been just another species of apes, no technological civilization (above sticks and stones, the level apes have been for millions of years, only humans being able to advance beyond that).
It could have been a chain reaction, something like, change in jaw muscles gave more room to the brain, and at the same time gave evolutionary advantage to increased intelligence (compensating for weaker jaws). Without it, human intelligence might not have appeared at all, no matter what other mutations would have happened. With some other mutations in addition to that one, there would be different "humans" than us, but without that one mutation, there might be nobody.
Sure, the conclusion may be wrong because, well, that's not how it happened, but not because it's somehow not possible for single mutation to be critical. So as far as I can see, it can easily be completely true, too.
I'm not sure if you are you saying that a commercial like that and sending out DVDs is a waste of money or not, but in any case it's not so. Quite the opposite...
Because I bet that most owners of a high-end cars (well, excluding those who were born rich and had a high-end sports car as their 16 year birthday present) had absolutely no intention of wasting money on one originally... But what do you know, people change their minds about stuff like this. First a marketing DVD, then a test drive, you know, just for the kicks, and then...
Well, when it's generically said that "MS Paint blows", I think it's about more than just screenshots.
Even when talking about screenshots, MS Paint allows one to easily add a piece of text and an arrow pointing at a feature, something I myself need quite often when I need to take a screenshot (which is not often at all).
The point being, MS Paint is a nifty little program for a lot of purposes, and generally speaking it does not blow. It does what it does well enough, quickly and without crashing, even on older hardware. If "what it does" doesn't include what you need, it just means it's the wrong program for the purpose, not that it blows.
Checked it out (google irfanview), and it looks like a good replacement for "Imaging for Windows", not for MS Paint. Looks like a good piece of software though.
Anyone who downloads and install GIMP just to take and print one screenshot is a moron. Even anyone (with average computer) who just starts GIMP to take and print one screenshot, then closes it, is a moron.
(Ok, actually they're not morons, they're just slightly clueless, but since you used the word...
Now don't get me wrong, GIMP is IMHO one of the most spectacular examples of what open source can do, truly a great piece of software. But MS Paint is actually quite a brilliant little program for some specific tasks, and comparing it to GIMP is like comparing Busybox vi to emacs. I'd go as far as to say that Paint one of the best, most useful programs MS has ever created. What ever happened to "small is beutiful"?
No. And I'm not saying that we should eat meat just before we can either. I'm saying that not eating meat does not make one more (or less) "moral" person, and that killing for food, in itself, is not unethical.
There are a lot of reasons to avoid eating meat (like ecological reason, meat production taking up much more land area per amount of food produced etc), and I definitely don't like horrible living conditions of animals in modern "industrialized" meat production either. But I don't really understand the thinking that killing animals for food is in principle unethical, IMHO that's being a bit too "civilized", a bit too detached from nature and facts of life.
I don't really see the distinction. To alter famous lyrics,
Is it better
To have lived and died,
Than never to have lived at all?
Considering our modern way of life and what it is doing to our planet, I don't think there would have been many naturally born animals taking the place of ones grown by us humans...
And about brutality, I'd say that in nature most animals die far more brutally than in normal human food (meat) production. First starvation, then disease, then being captured and ripped apart by a predator, leaving it's young to starve to death unless another predator finds them first...
We've become so civilized that we no longer need to make or even see brutal actions ourselves, that we've lost perspective on issues like this. Current thinking often seems to be "evil usually involves brutal and cruel things, so everything that is brutal and cruel must be evil". And as a result you have stuff like a lot of people thinking that eating meat is in itself wrong.
I'm talking about individual animals. Take that bull on a field (or in a "meat factory", or where ever). If that animal was not being grown for food, it would not exist. It wouldn't have ever had a chance to be born, even. That particular animal would not exist. And, given the finite resources of earth, no other animal would exist in it's place either (it'd be used for growing plants, or industry, or whatever).
In other words, deciding that animals should not be grown and killed for food is deciding that they are better of not existing at all. I'm not so sure that's a decision that allows you to take moral high ground...
I can think of a few examples, but the one I'm most familiar with is vegetarianism and compassion for other forms of life.
I'm an atheist and a vegetarian. I think it's cruel to kill animals for food, especially when it's not even necessary to eat meat and be healthy (heck, it's even healthier to NOT eat meat).
But so many times I would have an argument about this with a christian... and what do they end up resorting to? "The Bible says God put animals here for us to do with as we want."
In this example, people actually use their belief in a higher power to be less moral.
First, I'm an atheist too, and there definitely can be moral without "higher power".
I just have to disagree with your point of killing animals for food. If that animals was not going to be killed for food, it would not exist at all. IMHO it's more moral to allow something to exist for it's life, before dying (which, with animals at least, almost always equates to being killed by another creature).
Now, having huge "meat factories" with abysmal living conditions for animals is entirely another matter, and I can easily see that as justification for boycotting entire meat industry. Also health reasons are one good reason to not eat meath.
But generally saying that "killing animals for food is bad" is same as saying "those animals don't have a right to exist at all".
Ah, ok, then we've been talking about slightly different issue. Yeah, giving a corporation about same legal status as a person sounds a bit... strange, to put it kindly (I'm not American). I took the original statement in this thread ("companies should not have any special legal status") to mean something completely different...
That's 100m, 30m and 10m, ie 300ft, 100ft and 30ft.
No 3ft Bluetooth.
Of course if you want good, reliable data transfer rate, just divide the above distances by two or three...
So imagine a factory jointly owned by 10 people, and having 100 people working in it doing whatever that takes a 100 people do effectively. The factory pollutes a river, killing all the fish in it etc. Some of the owners didn't even know about it happening.
Now who is responsible and expected to pay up? Is it the owners? Is it the workers who actually performed the actions polluting the river? And responsible for how much money? If somebody should go to jail, then who would that be? Just answering these questions gives the company a legal status, defining the responsibilites in such an event. There are a lot of different issues (another example, if a factory owner dies, what happens to the factory?) that need to be defined, and defining them gives them legal status. And if there's no clear definitions, that makes the system wide open for corruption.
I think I kind of agree with you here. Making political parties, permanent political organizations, illegal might actually accomplish something. You'd be voting for an individual and his manifesto, then he'd be free to make whatever connections with other representatives during his term... In modern information society that might actually work in a productive way, voters easily finding out what his representative said before elections and what he actually did during his term, and then being able to decide if he'd still vote for him, etc.
Too bad that the political parties have the power, and they'll never allow something like this...
The point was that a society that falls behind in innovation and technology gets destroyed by others. What would limit innovation more than preventing things that require a lot people, money and organization, ie a company (private in capitalism, state-owned in communism)?
Just one problem.
Capital.
Capitalism is about allowing capital to be gathered from many persons to accomplish things that are more expensive than one person could ever hope to be able to afford. If everything had to be accomplished by one person, not a lot would be accomplished... As soon as you have just two people doing something together, you have a company, wether it has a legal status or not. As soon as you have something jointly owned by more than one person, you have some kind of a company. You're not planning to make owning things together illegal, are you?
Another purpose of a company is shared risk. If people would have to risk everything for anything they do, not a lot would get accomplished.
And there's a reason why you might want to have a lot accomplished. For example ancient American Indians probably didn't really have the concept of a company as we know it, and their society probably worked quite nicely too, until the Europeans came and slaughtered them in the process of the birth of the USA...
It's human nature. You know, same thing that makes huge explosions etc in "big" Hollywood movies a must, the same thing that gives most people immense satisfaction when they kill their best friend in an online FPS, same thing that makes a
Power, man, POWER! Slaughter their men and children, rape their women and then bring the best of them home as slaves! RaaaaAAAH! . . .
If you just don't get it, you're probably emotinally more female than male
In my opinion, if an application is about controlling something else, such as media content, then it either should be fully standards-compliant, or not bundled. So, from your list, IE is pretty much the only product that should get more attention, in addition to Windows Media Player. Oh, and obiviously same principle should apply to Apple too, they shouldn't be allowed to ship integrated browser that is not standards compliant.
MS Office is also a de-facto standard, and should be forced to open the file formats, but it's not bundled with Windows, so slightly different issue.
To put it bluntly, any software product that has over 50% market share should be forced to fully open their file formats etc, for example by being completely standards compliant, or fully documenting anything that is not.
IMHO of course.
E-mail has the big advantage that the communication is automatically archived (in your sent/received folders).
Of course if there's no response to an e-mail, it might be wise to follow up with oral communication...
I'd say that gets you to the *right* side of DMCA...
Considering what DMCA implies, being in the legal side of it is definitely the wrong side to be in. Unless you want your country to turn into corporate oligarchy, of course....