I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon.
Eh? It talks about them in some depth. It notes that RI's patents are pending so it can't sue until they issue, but it can amend them to strengthen a potential action. It has some discussion of their copyrights, as well.
So, if someone chooses to be a farmer, do I have the right to compel them to feed me?
Well, yes, at least indirectly. A portion of our taxes go toward buying food for the poor. It's called "food stamps", and I believe every state has such a program.
And occasionally the government has a bright idea. When farmers are having pricing troubles, the government sometimes purchases a portion of their crops at a low cost to give to the poor. This raises the price of those crops and simultaneously feeds hungry folks. Society as a whole benefits (since farms create wealth and help provide security for the country, so it really is bad for them to fail).
Finally, the government gives tax breaks to people and companies that assist the poor through charity. Some of these charities help the poor get regular meals. Most folks, whether they agree with the above programs or not, seem to agree that this system is useful.
So, yeah, in our society I have the right to compel folks to feed me. I can't walk into farmers' homes and help myself from their fridges, no, but throughout the nation, at both the federal and state levels, we've voted to make sure people have access to food regardless of their financial circumstances.
If you actually read the constitution, you will note that the 'general welfare' clause is in the damn preamble.
Spoken like someone who has never read past the Preamble. Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Emphasis mine, in case you have trouble reading all that, too.
Even today, the city of DeQueen, Arkansas employs an old Native American in the water department. He has the willow sticks like father in law used, but he also has a pair of copper rods that he likes better.
That was such a fascinating story, I called up John O'Connor, Water Superintendent for DeQueen. Despite almost two decades with the city's water department, he knows nothing of such a man and denies that the city has used dowsing in his tenure or, to his knowledge, in his lifetime. Nor is he familiar with any local legends of such a thing. Since the department employs only 70 people, I'm pretty sure Mr. O'Connor is familiar with them all.
I assume your father-in-law's acuity with the "witchin' sticks" is equally fictitious, and that your personal experience is simple wishful thinking.
Okay... I did cite a whole bunch of the main reasons why speedometers are inaccurate, and I agree, most of them are simply measurement difficulty.
Sure, and I agreed that speedometers are rough. You even missed some significant stuff like temperature and tire pressure. (Changing tire sizes, which you mentioned, isn't really a factor tho', since in theory you're required to recalibrate after doing so: That's a user error, not a fault of the device.)
Speedometers in the US can be off by as much as 5% coming out of the factory, and it's not uncommon for them to be operating with a 10% margin of error. No argument that they're not precise. I just wanted to raise the point that mathematics aren't a factor; the errors are due to limitations in engineering, manufacturing, and consumer budgets, not in our ability to calculate.
Are you insane? We have as exact a value for pi as we need, far more accurate than any machine tools we can construct. Accurate enough to measure the entire universe down to Planck values, if it comes to that. Speedometers are rough, but it ain't because we don't know enough digits of pi.
Which accountant do you hire to manage your money?
Well, neither of them, but that's neither here nor there.* The trouble with the analogy is that I don't ask my accountant for social justice and civil liberty protections. The other trouble with it is that you're stacking the deck: There's quite a few successful community college grads and failed Harvard men.
Would you choose the accountant who has a family with good connections and old frat brothers in the biz, or the one who grew up in a trailer park but made good for himself? What if the only one you heard about was the former?
Wouldn't the nitrates in the soil act as a fertilizer for plants, as opposed to leaving it floating in the air for humans to breathe in?
Both. Some bacteria make ammonium from nitrogen, which keeps it in the soil. Others dump it in the air as N(2) and N(2)O. Local conditions limit how much gets mineralized into ammonium naturally. If there's enough oxygen around, other bacteria make it into nitrates, which then feed more plants. I reckon if they're planted sparsely, removed regularly (and composted properly), or rotated with nitrate-hungry plants, quite a lot would stay in the dirt. So, yeah, fertilizer and stuff, although some nitrogen is gonna float away no matter what.
i don't buy noonan's premise. most elected officials i know (and i know hundreds) don't come from any so-called privileged "leadership class," whatever that is, they come instead from nearly all walks of life and bring with them the experience of extremely diverse backgrounds, including poverty and marginalization.
Every presidential nominee since 1988 has graduated from either Harvard or Yale. More than 25% of the 108th Congress was from the Ivy League. Twenty percent of Congress attended private schools before college. Fifteen current Representatives attended community colleges. No Senators did so.
The average Senator has more than $15,000,000 in disclosed assets; the average Representative, more than $5,000,000; in fairness, the wealthiest in Congress have hundreds of millions, while the poorest have millions in liabilities. (Most also have considerable assets they aren't required to report, such as private home values.) A few Reps come from backgrounds of poverty, and quite a few more are from blue-collar families. All current Senators, as far as I can tell reasonably quickly, have backgrounds of upper-middle-class or higher.
I'm sure state and local politicians have more diverse backgrounds, but at the federal level there's unquestionably a tendency toward lifelong wealth and privilege.
The "kingdom of Egypt" (the state of the Farao's) ? (exterminated to the last man by muslims)
Eh? The Kingdom of Egypt was Islamic. The Revolution of 1952 got rid of the notion of state religion, although of course the people of Egypt are still predominantly Muslims.
Farouk abdicated after the coup, which was not about religion, but corruption and the popular feeling that he was a British puppet. It wasn't a bloodless uprising but it was short, the death toll was light, and AFAIK the only civilian casualties were police who fought in opposition. That revolution paved the way to the modern, relatively liberal Egypt we know today.
The first "windows" version was the "MS-DOS EXECUTIVE". Later, they came out with something called "Windows 1.1". This much I remember from some video I saw a while ago while browsing around some "vintage computer" sites (don't remember exactly where)
No, Windows 1.0 (not trademarked then, tho') was the Microsoft Windows Operating Environment. I still have the original box, disks, and manuals and I'm lookin' at them right now. The manual lists 1.0 as the version, although it's not on the box anywhere.
The big difference is, for the most part Comcast's remedies if you subvert them are largely civil in nature -- denying you future service, charging you penalty fees, suing you, or the like. The government can have you thrown in prison.
The FCC can't imprison you. Only Congress (at the Federal level) can pass laws with prison time. FCC rules are administrative, which is more akin to civil than criminal law. At most, the FCC may investigate certain crimes, but those crimes were defined by Congress, and a law enforcement body would have to make the arrest.
That's not to say I think they should be given authority; the last thing we need on the 'net is a gang of holier-than-thou thugs armed with the power to fine and a giant banhammer. These guys have a long history of misdirected moral crusading, corruption, and arrogance, and they should be relegated to maintaining only the technical aspects of communication in America -- and that under close supervision when money is involved.
Just to be a pedant, I think you're confusing one of Asimov's essays with Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is crud"). Asimov wrote an essay about becoming a writer, claiming that only perhaps 1% of prospective writers were published, and only 1% of those were published a second time, and so forth. It's an easy mistake, I s'pose, since Sturgeon also wrote sci-fi. (Of course, Asimov wrote a lot so I might've overlooked that quote, but it doesn't sound like him and I can't find it anywhere.)
It's worth noting that Asimov's 1% rule is no longer really true but Sturgeon's Law marches on.
In short, the numbers I have are sufficient because nothing would deviate from what is already happening.
Strange, the first part of my post got eaten between preview and submit. I posted the numbers the state used, which are based on research, rather than idle speculation like your argument.
They came up with the figure that, in the initial phase, this would save a driver $16 a year in gas, and when it's fully ramped up, $20 per year. Overall, they estimate it reducing statewide emissions by 700,000 tons of CO(2). You have a nice-sounding argument; they have the results of actual empirical testing. Even the groups opposing these rules aren't disputing that the rules will be effective, and those guys are industry pros with engineering degrees and everything.
You need to post the results of real tests rather than intellectual exercises.
Also, I'm not a resident of CA, but I am a citizen of the USA which means I can alert fellow citizens of inane regulation and allow them to act if they wish.
Sure you can; I phrased that poorly. I meant comment formally, not comment on Slashdot. The rules are open to public comments before they're set in stone, but you have to live here to do so.
But you're still a damned fool for arguing that things ain't the way they are, like the man who saw an elephant and said "there ain't no such animal". If you want to argue with the results of controlled testing, argue with the methodology, or find or perform a study that gets different results. Waving your arms and spouting theory is meaningless when compared to empirical research.
Okay, not really, but I'm making a point. Everything I see out there shows Lego actively opposing domain squatting both as it applies to their stuff (but avoiding suing squatters) and as a general principle. I see no accusations, credible or not, of them squatting, although I confess I'm not looking too hard.
Unless you're calling defensive domain registration "squatting", but you'd be the first I've heard make that argument.
It's not the same and provides no noticeable benefit that this would take advantage of.
Now, if the glass significantly impacts signal transmission, that could be an issue, but that's entirely separate from claiming that the regs will have no benefit. However, the criticism on these grounds so far are all "may" and "could" degrade communication. If it prevents GPS, 911 calls, and tracking parolee ankle bracelets, it's a problem; if it makes it slightly harder to tune into WKRP at the edge of their broadcast range, I'm not too worried. The state's current response, suggesting that antennae be used, seems disingenuous for a variety of reasons. I'd prefer this be evaluated more thoroughly before the rules pass.
Either way, it would be pretty stupid to require the regulation on vehicles with no A/C, regardless of any other issues.
But let's bear in mind that these rules are not yet passed. If you have a problem with 'em, and you're a Californian, you can go ahead and comment on 'em before they're published. Do so, by all means, but don't be a damned fool and argue the quantifiable aspects of them without better numbers of your own.
Show me one business that has been around 'for the long haul' that does not have at least one black mark of this type on it's record, and I'll back down.
Lego. Zippo. They're out there, although few and far between: Small companies that actually make things and aren't cutthroat because they're the best at what they do, that live on reputations of quality--real quality, not the word "quality". And more often than not, they end up selling out to huge conglomerates that either wisely let them do their thing in peace (Ben & Jerry's), or milk their reputation while letting them rot (Singer). But there are a (very) few out there that stay independent and manage to not be evil without it being a marketing strategy.
If they need a new homeland they shouldn't have to pay for it. Those who took their land from them should be forced to pay.
That may be true, but it's really hard to get the gold out of seawater, and the exchange rate for fish poop and clam shells is really bad right now. So in practical terms it's probably better for them to just buy the land.
While one can feel sorry for the citizens of the Maldives, the simple fact is that it isn't very good long term planning to build permanent domiciles in a place which is 1.5 meters above what the water surface is at the moment. In many places that might leave you with your house submerged after a heavy rainfall.
They've been living there quite happily for roughly 2000 years; I'd call that doing okay in the long term. Rainfall isn't really a problem, because, see, these are islands, and rain sort of goes down into the ocean. There's no hurricane season, so that's not much of an issue to my knowledge. The occasional tsunami is devastating, but the trade-off is easy access to shipping, a forgiving climate, and lots of seafood, which to many is worth the risk.
In that light I'm not sure it's appropriate to regard it as lost revenue, but rather a limited time opportunity which can and has been exploited.
Can't disagree with you there, except inasmuch as saying it "has been" exploited. Oceans are rising at about 3 mm/year, so while there's cause for concern and planning, I don't think they need to evacuate just yet. As noted in the summary, they're quite wisely diversifying their investment by trying to buy an emergency backup homeland.
Let's not - there's no such thing as a neurosis. Freud was an intellectual fraud, and even the DSM has finally gotten rid of the concept.
You're being harsher than I think is called for. First, neuroses aren't a Freudian concept. Second, while they're no longer used diagnostically, they're still used conceptually--they're just classified as specific disorders now. Third, I don't think the GP intended the use of the term as a clinical diagnosis of everyone on the planet, just metaphorical-like. (It may also be worth adding that neuroticism is still a valid measurement when doing personality metrics.)
On the one hand, $10 million isn't something to sneeze at, even for a company with $200 billion in yearly revenue.
It's one-twenty thousandth of their revenue. It would be the equivalent of a person earning $40,000 per year getting penalized two dollars. So while it's not a trivial amount in itself, it's not exactly a painful price to pay. Mind you, that's not to say I think she should ask for more; other recipients may choose to attack 'em, which would run the costs up to a noticeable hit. Also, while I think the emails were way out of line, they weren't unimaginably evil--IMO they were just a very stupid misjudgment. Nobody should get nailed to the wall, although one hopes the marketeer that approved the campaign will get a nasty lecture.
That $10 million represents a lot of lower level employee's worth of salary which might lead to lots of average Joes getting layed off (face it, it won't be the execs. that feel the hurt).
Nobody'd get (ahem) laid off from the sting of the bill; Toyota has more than $30B cash in hand.
One solution is to apply the very same punitive penalty, but award the punitive part of it to a fund/charity. In essence, whenever a major company causes somebody harm, that person is eligible to receive whatever amount is considered reasonable depending on the damages. In addition to that, the company is also fined an amount that is relative to its size and financial status, simply as a form of punishment. The latter amount never comes in contact with the victim.
The elegant thing about giving victims the penalty money is that it encourages them to take on litigation. A lawsuit is expensive, risky, and time-consuming. Without motivating litigants and lawyers with potential rewards, the powerful would be much freer to abuse the weak. In your system, this lady would stand to win at most a few thousand in actual damages, but would risk losing tens of thousands in costs should Toyota prevail. Further, all the good lawyers would be on salary or retainer for large companies; few would be willing to work for a chance to get paid a reasonable hourly rate.
It's good to keep large companies walking on eggshells when it comes to causing harm, and the current tort system is the best way we know to do so that we can afford.
That's what I was wondering, so I peeked. Initially when I saw this article, I was a bit disturbed, since people don't donate to the EFF for this purpose--that's what contributions to research organizations and universities are for. However, it turns out the money comes from a private individual specifically for this purpose; the EFF merely administers the award. It's free publicity for 'em in a good cause, a Good Thing by my reckoning.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon.
Eh? It talks about them in some depth. It notes that RI's patents are pending so it can't sue until they issue, but it can amend them to strengthen a potential action. It has some discussion of their copyrights, as well.
So, if someone chooses to be a farmer, do I have the right to compel them to feed me?
Well, yes, at least indirectly. A portion of our taxes go toward buying food for the poor. It's called "food stamps", and I believe every state has such a program.
And occasionally the government has a bright idea. When farmers are having pricing troubles, the government sometimes purchases a portion of their crops at a low cost to give to the poor. This raises the price of those crops and simultaneously feeds hungry folks. Society as a whole benefits (since farms create wealth and help provide security for the country, so it really is bad for them to fail).
Finally, the government gives tax breaks to people and companies that assist the poor through charity. Some of these charities help the poor get regular meals. Most folks, whether they agree with the above programs or not, seem to agree that this system is useful.
So, yeah, in our society I have the right to compel folks to feed me. I can't walk into farmers' homes and help myself from their fridges, no, but throughout the nation, at both the federal and state levels, we've voted to make sure people have access to food regardless of their financial circumstances.
If you actually read the constitution, you will note that the 'general welfare' clause is in the damn preamble.
Spoken like someone who has never read past the Preamble. Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Emphasis mine, in case you have trouble reading all that, too.
Even today, the city of DeQueen, Arkansas employs an old Native American in the water department. He has the willow sticks like father in law used, but he also has a pair of copper rods that he likes better.
That was such a fascinating story, I called up John O'Connor, Water Superintendent for DeQueen. Despite almost two decades with the city's water department, he knows nothing of such a man and denies that the city has used dowsing in his tenure or, to his knowledge, in his lifetime. Nor is he familiar with any local legends of such a thing. Since the department employs only 70 people, I'm pretty sure Mr. O'Connor is familiar with them all.
I assume your father-in-law's acuity with the "witchin' sticks" is equally fictitious, and that your personal experience is simple wishful thinking.
Okay... I did cite a whole bunch of the main reasons why speedometers are inaccurate, and I agree, most of them are simply measurement difficulty.
Sure, and I agreed that speedometers are rough. You even missed some significant stuff like temperature and tire pressure. (Changing tire sizes, which you mentioned, isn't really a factor tho', since in theory you're required to recalibrate after doing so: That's a user error, not a fault of the device.)
Speedometers in the US can be off by as much as 5% coming out of the factory, and it's not uncommon for them to be operating with a 10% margin of error. No argument that they're not precise. I just wanted to raise the point that mathematics aren't a factor; the errors are due to limitations in engineering, manufacturing, and consumer budgets, not in our ability to calculate.
Yep, and we have *such* and exact value for Pi.
Are you insane? We have as exact a value for pi as we need, far more accurate than any machine tools we can construct. Accurate enough to measure the entire universe down to Planck values, if it comes to that. Speedometers are rough, but it ain't because we don't know enough digits of pi.
Which accountant do you hire to manage your money?
Well, neither of them, but that's neither here nor there.* The trouble with the analogy is that I don't ask my accountant for social justice and civil liberty protections. The other trouble with it is that you're stacking the deck: There's quite a few successful community college grads and failed Harvard men.
Would you choose the accountant who has a family with good connections and old frat brothers in the biz, or the one who grew up in a trailer park but made good for himself? What if the only one you heard about was the former?
Unless Toyota intends to bury the plants every year then they are not doing anything to help sequester carbon.
Nor are they trying to. So that works out pretty well.
(The plan is to reduce carbon emissions by keeping the area near the plant nice and cool.)
Wouldn't the nitrates in the soil act as a fertilizer for plants, as opposed to leaving it floating in the air for humans to breathe in?
Both. Some bacteria make ammonium from nitrogen, which keeps it in the soil. Others dump it in the air as N(2) and N(2)O. Local conditions limit how much gets mineralized into ammonium naturally. If there's enough oxygen around, other bacteria make it into nitrates, which then feed more plants. I reckon if they're planted sparsely, removed regularly (and composted properly), or rotated with nitrate-hungry plants, quite a lot would stay in the dirt. So, yeah, fertilizer and stuff, although some nitrogen is gonna float away no matter what.
i don't buy noonan's premise. most elected officials i know (and i know hundreds) don't come from any so-called privileged "leadership class," whatever that is, they come instead from nearly all walks of life and bring with them the experience of extremely diverse backgrounds, including poverty and marginalization.
Every presidential nominee since 1988 has graduated from either Harvard or Yale. More than 25% of the 108th Congress was from the Ivy League. Twenty percent of Congress attended private schools before college. Fifteen current Representatives attended community colleges. No Senators did so.
The average Senator has more than $15,000,000 in disclosed assets; the average Representative, more than $5,000,000; in fairness, the wealthiest in Congress have hundreds of millions, while the poorest have millions in liabilities. (Most also have considerable assets they aren't required to report, such as private home values.) A few Reps come from backgrounds of poverty, and quite a few more are from blue-collar families. All current Senators, as far as I can tell reasonably quickly, have backgrounds of upper-middle-class or higher.
I'm sure state and local politicians have more diverse backgrounds, but at the federal level there's unquestionably a tendency toward lifelong wealth and privilege.
The "kingdom of Egypt" (the state of the Farao's) ? (exterminated to the last man by muslims)
Eh? The Kingdom of Egypt was Islamic. The Revolution of 1952 got rid of the notion of state religion, although of course the people of Egypt are still predominantly Muslims.
Farouk abdicated after the coup, which was not about religion, but corruption and the popular feeling that he was a British puppet. It wasn't a bloodless uprising but it was short, the death toll was light, and AFAIK the only civilian casualties were police who fought in opposition. That revolution paved the way to the modern, relatively liberal Egypt we know today.
The first "windows" version was the "MS-DOS EXECUTIVE". Later, they came out with something called "Windows 1.1". This much I remember from some video I saw a while ago while browsing around some "vintage computer" sites (don't remember exactly where)
No, Windows 1.0 (not trademarked then, tho') was the Microsoft Windows Operating Environment. I still have the original box, disks, and manuals and I'm lookin' at them right now. The manual lists 1.0 as the version, although it's not on the box anywhere.
The big difference is, for the most part Comcast's remedies if you subvert them are largely civil in nature -- denying you future service, charging you penalty fees, suing you, or the like. The government can have you thrown in prison.
The FCC can't imprison you. Only Congress (at the Federal level) can pass laws with prison time. FCC rules are administrative, which is more akin to civil than criminal law. At most, the FCC may investigate certain crimes, but those crimes were defined by Congress, and a law enforcement body would have to make the arrest.
That's not to say I think they should be given authority; the last thing we need on the 'net is a gang of holier-than-thou thugs armed with the power to fine and a giant banhammer. These guys have a long history of misdirected moral crusading, corruption, and arrogance, and they should be relegated to maintaining only the technical aspects of communication in America -- and that under close supervision when money is involved.
"99% of any genre is trash"-Isaac Asimov
Just to be a pedant, I think you're confusing one of Asimov's essays with Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is crud"). Asimov wrote an essay about becoming a writer, claiming that only perhaps 1% of prospective writers were published, and only 1% of those were published a second time, and so forth. It's an easy mistake, I s'pose, since Sturgeon also wrote sci-fi. (Of course, Asimov wrote a lot so I might've overlooked that quote, but it doesn't sound like him and I can't find it anywhere.)
It's worth noting that Asimov's 1% rule is no longer really true but Sturgeon's Law marches on.
In short, the numbers I have are sufficient because nothing would deviate from what is already happening.
Strange, the first part of my post got eaten between preview and submit. I posted the numbers the state used, which are based on research, rather than idle speculation like your argument.
They came up with the figure that, in the initial phase, this would save a driver $16 a year in gas, and when it's fully ramped up, $20 per year. Overall, they estimate it reducing statewide emissions by 700,000 tons of CO(2). You have a nice-sounding argument; they have the results of actual empirical testing. Even the groups opposing these rules aren't disputing that the rules will be effective, and those guys are industry pros with engineering degrees and everything.
You need to post the results of real tests rather than intellectual exercises.
Also, I'm not a resident of CA, but I am a citizen of the USA which means I can alert fellow citizens of inane regulation and allow them to act if they wish.
Sure you can; I phrased that poorly. I meant comment formally, not comment on Slashdot. The rules are open to public comments before they're set in stone, but you have to live here to do so.
But you're still a damned fool for arguing that things ain't the way they are, like the man who saw an elephant and said "there ain't no such animal". If you want to argue with the results of controlled testing, argue with the methodology, or find or perform a study that gets different results. Waving your arms and spouting theory is meaningless when compared to empirical research.
Lego? You mean the Internet domain squatter?
This from gzipped_tar, the wife beater.
Okay, not really, but I'm making a point. Everything I see out there shows Lego actively opposing domain squatting both as it applies to their stuff (but avoiding suing squatters) and as a general principle. I see no accusations, credible or not, of them squatting, although I confess I'm not looking too hard.
Unless you're calling defensive domain registration "squatting", but you'd be the first I've heard make that argument.
Look how stupid you are. The drag caused by the AC unit is TINY. Your comparison would work if you left a single 10W light bulb on, if that.
Tiny multiplied by 23,000,000 is not always so tiny.
It's not the same and provides no noticeable benefit that this would take advantage of.
Now, if the glass significantly impacts signal transmission, that could be an issue, but that's entirely separate from claiming that the regs will have no benefit. However, the criticism on these grounds so far are all "may" and "could" degrade communication. If it prevents GPS, 911 calls, and tracking parolee ankle bracelets, it's a problem; if it makes it slightly harder to tune into WKRP at the edge of their broadcast range, I'm not too worried. The state's current response, suggesting that antennae be used, seems disingenuous for a variety of reasons. I'd prefer this be evaluated more thoroughly before the rules pass.
Either way, it would be pretty stupid to require the regulation on vehicles with no A/C, regardless of any other issues.
But let's bear in mind that these rules are not yet passed. If you have a problem with 'em, and you're a Californian, you can go ahead and comment on 'em before they're published. Do so, by all means, but don't be a damned fool and argue the quantifiable aspects of them without better numbers of your own.
Show me one business that has been around 'for the long haul' that does not have at least one black mark of this type on it's record, and I'll back down.
Lego. Zippo. They're out there, although few and far between: Small companies that actually make things and aren't cutthroat because they're the best at what they do, that live on reputations of quality--real quality, not the word "quality". And more often than not, they end up selling out to huge conglomerates that either wisely let them do their thing in peace (Ben & Jerry's), or milk their reputation while letting them rot (Singer). But there are a (very) few out there that stay independent and manage to not be evil without it being a marketing strategy.
If they need a new homeland they shouldn't have to pay for it. Those who took their land from them should be forced to pay.
That may be true, but it's really hard to get the gold out of seawater, and the exchange rate for fish poop and clam shells is really bad right now. So in practical terms it's probably better for them to just buy the land.
While one can feel sorry for the citizens of the Maldives, the simple fact is that it isn't very good long term planning to build permanent domiciles in a place which is 1.5 meters above what the water surface is at the moment. In many places that might leave you with your house submerged after a heavy rainfall.
They've been living there quite happily for roughly 2000 years; I'd call that doing okay in the long term. Rainfall isn't really a problem, because, see, these are islands, and rain sort of goes down into the ocean. There's no hurricane season, so that's not much of an issue to my knowledge. The occasional tsunami is devastating, but the trade-off is easy access to shipping, a forgiving climate, and lots of seafood, which to many is worth the risk.
In that light I'm not sure it's appropriate to regard it as lost revenue, but rather a limited time opportunity which can and has been exploited.
Can't disagree with you there, except inasmuch as saying it "has been" exploited. Oceans are rising at about 3 mm/year, so while there's cause for concern and planning, I don't think they need to evacuate just yet. As noted in the summary, they're quite wisely diversifying their investment by trying to buy an emergency backup homeland.
Let's not - there's no such thing as a neurosis. Freud was an intellectual fraud, and even the DSM has finally gotten rid of the concept.
You're being harsher than I think is called for. First, neuroses aren't a Freudian concept. Second, while they're no longer used diagnostically, they're still used conceptually--they're just classified as specific disorders now. Third, I don't think the GP intended the use of the term as a clinical diagnosis of everyone on the planet, just metaphorical-like. (It may also be worth adding that neuroticism is still a valid measurement when doing personality metrics.)
On the one hand, $10 million isn't something to sneeze at, even for a company with $200 billion in yearly revenue.
It's one-twenty thousandth of their revenue. It would be the equivalent of a person earning $40,000 per year getting penalized two dollars. So while it's not a trivial amount in itself, it's not exactly a painful price to pay. Mind you, that's not to say I think she should ask for more; other recipients may choose to attack 'em, which would run the costs up to a noticeable hit. Also, while I think the emails were way out of line, they weren't unimaginably evil--IMO they were just a very stupid misjudgment. Nobody should get nailed to the wall, although one hopes the marketeer that approved the campaign will get a nasty lecture.
That $10 million represents a lot of lower level employee's worth of salary which might lead to lots of average Joes getting layed off (face it, it won't be the execs. that feel the hurt).
Nobody'd get (ahem) laid off from the sting of the bill; Toyota has more than $30B cash in hand.
One solution is to apply the very same punitive penalty, but award the punitive part of it to a fund/charity. In essence, whenever a major company causes somebody harm, that person is eligible to receive whatever amount is considered reasonable depending on the damages. In addition to that, the company is also fined an amount that is relative to its size and financial status, simply as a form of punishment. The latter amount never comes in contact with the victim.
The elegant thing about giving victims the penalty money is that it encourages them to take on litigation. A lawsuit is expensive, risky, and time-consuming. Without motivating litigants and lawyers with potential rewards, the powerful would be much freer to abuse the weak. In your system, this lady would stand to win at most a few thousand in actual damages, but would risk losing tens of thousands in costs should Toyota prevail. Further, all the good lawyers would be on salary or retainer for large companies; few would be willing to work for a chance to get paid a reasonable hourly rate.
It's good to keep large companies walking on eggshells when it comes to causing harm, and the current tort system is the best way we know to do so that we can afford.
So what's their interest in this?
That's what I was wondering, so I peeked. Initially when I saw this article, I was a bit disturbed, since people don't donate to the EFF for this purpose--that's what contributions to research organizations and universities are for. However, it turns out the money comes from a private individual specifically for this purpose; the EFF merely administers the award. It's free publicity for 'em in a good cause, a Good Thing by my reckoning.