That may be so, but I don't know if IE has an extension or an option that makes it so easy as clicking a button on the toolbar. Without the extension for Firebird it's still sort of a hassle, where I have to open up the right menu and navigate a tree of options. I checked and it doesn't seem to me that you can just add the option to the toolbar. Can anybody correct me on this?
I guess it's just a sign of the times. Previously, it seems that nobody had to worry about diseases and a criminal history and everything (well, diseases because we didn't know many of them existed), but this is certainly because people wouldn't travel as much and tended to know their dates for a long time before they began dating.
Now, people are dating others whom they haven't even met, and who might be only telling lies to them, so clearly there's a need for this.
It's like an incorporation of romance and love. If you're running a small business or a small store, you will very likely know your customers (and employees) very well and be able to trust them without too many problems, but when business scale up and become increasingly large, there's no way that you can account for all of the people, or know them personally, and so there's record-keeping and spying and every such thing.
Obviously with online (or more anonymous) dating you have access to so many more potential mates, which improves selection and makes things somewhat easier, but all the anonymity and deception makes me wonder if this whole trend is actually a good thing or not.
But all this doesn't affect me. Joining slashdot is like taking a vow of celibacy.
If only you used Firebird with the downloadable Preferences bar to surf with images disabled. It helps when you incidentally stumble into some questionable material at work or anywhere else. You can RealDoll all day and just see blocks in place of images. That is, until your sysadmin starts checking access logs.
It kind of reminds me of how the Annual Hockey game is always North America vs. the World (even though the world has some good hockey players).
That's wonderful also and I think that the Internet and everything should also be more globalized, but the DNS servers are providing a resource that has a certain demand associated. Simply, the internet should be skewed to America because, for whatever reason (they are obvious), America likely generates the most requests and receives the most requests (though I don't know the numbers, maybe China is coming close?). Obviously, if nearly all of the surfing consists of Americans accessing American sites, then an extra server in Germany serves little utility (aside from alleviating, perhaps, accesses outside of the country).
So (obviously) establishing more servers in other countries won't globalize the internet any more, it's an indication (and a positive one) of some increasing global demand.
That is, unless Germany just wasting a bunch of money simply so that the world may pass the U.S. in Root servers.
I don't see how you could buy clothing without trying it on.
I (and many other men, I'm assuming) do it all the time. We do the hold it up to our body thing (mentioned earlier), but frequently I'll just get my general size. Oh, I wear medium shirts so just buy medium shirts (especially if I stick with a certain brand). There's none of this garbage that women deal with where a size 1 at one place is a size 5 at another or whatever because pants are 33 inches in the waist and 34 inches long. Period.
I think that the problem with this is that it might be exceedingly clever if it weren't in between markets. People who simply don't care (for argument, I'll just say "men") might use it and take a look, but they couldn't care less if a store didn't have the feature, because it's not too influential in their decision. Those who do care ("women") wouldn't be satisfied with this sort of technology (especially if it hasn't yet been proven) and would insist on trying the clothes on regardless, to ensure the colors look right "in this light" or some similar thing, to see how the clothes hang, how they move when she walks or whatever.
It's like selling the hybrid manual/automatic gearshifts in cars (though I don't know if this has been at all successful). Those who hate having to worry about shifting would just as soon go with an automatic, and those who really enjoy the control and fun of driving a manual would probably prefer a manual (of course). So I don't know if it's a winning tactic trying to market to this middle, "grey" market where there might not actually be many people.
... well, actually money that they were going to lose anyway. It's brilliant, actually. SCO is mired in this horrific, indefensible, and losing legal, so why not just pony up $25K of money the market's going to steal from them to look like they're going out as heroes?
It's like a king who's about to be overthrown using the treasury (the people's coffers) to buy himself some nice clothes to get overthrown in.
Well, in this update, India's really stormed the scene, knocking off the previous leaders. What happened to China and Mexico? I thought NAFTA and China's induction into... well... it just leads the paranoid Americans to wonder who'll be next in sniping the American economy. Stay tuned.
Wonderful point, though the "raping" metaphor is a little jarring. Free trade, just like good credit, or anything such open transfer of some good only works if it is reciprocated. If I extend you all the faith and credit in the world, and you lie and cheat to me every chance you get, I lose whatever I trusted you with and you won't be able to get any credit any more. Things would likely have been better if we were both open and honest (and could have a sustainably beneficial relationship) or if we were both protectionist so I wouldn't have gotten screwed by you.
I.e. if one country exports a huge amount of a certain asset so that the country can make a lot of money and take advantage of the world's consumer base, but places huge tariffs on imports, other nations will likely try to establish their own protectionist policies, thus killing free trade (and likely hurting the selfish country's reputation, whatever). Likewise if a country strongly limits exports (who knows why) but offers completely free imports to give its citizens the best competition they possibly can, it will alienate businesses looking to establish in the country.
What's necessary is the free flow (both ways) of goods, capital, whatever (of course this is idealized) to ensure the balance between giving businesses a competitive advantage and giving its citizens a fair market.
America is freely trading its valuable resource (jobs) and India is gladly accepting them. However, India is certainly much less likely to send jobs to America and, from my understanding, should an American want to work in India (at an Indian firm) it would be very difficult to get a good job there.
So America is killing the competitive advantage that American workers had in jobs in the hope that American consumers would get more afforable software (could happen, or the execs could pocket the cash). And India is accepting all this inflow of capital from the jobs to better their economy and make their businesses more prominent and competitive, but this comes at the cost of their own citizens, likely. These Indian companies are not making any products or anything to directly benefit the Indian citizens (with their average income and poverty level, I'd imagine Indian citizens are not quite a strong market for iPods and such, correct me if I'm wrong), and rather they are more greatly stretching the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Certainly things weren't necessarily balanced before regarding jobs and the like, but it's my feeling that America's corporation-friendly open job market philosophy and India's (equally corporation-friendly?) protectionism are only going to do damage to the situation, in some manner.
Does that makes sense? It seems that the corporations just win across the board? That and the smart Indian tech workers, I suppose.
Simple Adam Smith, huh? Well, if you look at it from a macroeconomic perspective, there is a significant potential for loss here. Yes, they will work for less money which makes sense from a business standpoint, but any income sent overseas is capital that the country is losing. So where are these benefits? Well, lower salaries allow the money-makers to produce more cheaply and either pocket a greater margin, or tinker the price to maximize profits. Pretty good things for that guy, of course. But monopolies and misinformation (i.e. insider trading) are also good for the guy in charge. So the investors and shareholders are making more money, but you might have losers here. The people losing their jobs are (obviously) definite losers. But perhaps also the economy. If America makes this software, or provides IT services more affordably such that the American economy can make up the difference by opening the market to other countries, then maybe the country can benefit (i.e. cheaper software allows a company to sell in China, which yields significant inflow of cash). However, if the outsourcing doesn't bring in more capital than is lost, the effect is stereotypically "bad". America loses valuable capital that could be invested in the economy (in the form of American income and taxes from that income) and it stratifies the country even more (a middle-class person loses their job and becomes more poor, a wealthy executive pockets a higher margin and becomes even wealthier). So America's poorer and the wealth gap is even greater. That's great economics.
Of course, from a microeconomic point of view, it makes perfect sense to the executive, right? Well, yes. But then there is also the well-cited example of Dell pulling its call centers back to America. You forget the intangibles (things that economists too frequently skim over while also greatly emphasizing). These things aggravate economists because they are obviously so important and yet not measurable in cash value (or not easily measurable). We're talking lost business due to quality, even language, or any other such thing. Or perhaps the ripple effect of a weakened economy, or any other such thing that makes anything unappealing, outside of a bottom-line point of view. I am a software engineer, and I'm not going to proclaim this as the Apocalypse, necessarily, but I think economically, you're "Adam Smith" perspective is either flawed or too limited. We have had economic developments since The Wealth of Nations, i.e. Keynes vs. oh, who's the other guy?
Bottom line, this could certainly be a bad thing not only for the people who lose their jobs. It could be bad for the country.
We get something like KWindows and Microsoft sues? I'm surprised that they haven't gotten in a fit already over their trademarking "Office" (or is the Trademark Microsoft Office).
Hopefully everything will have been streamlined so that the importing and extension compatibility won't be an issue.
Though I may not be entirely proud of it, though, I've done most of my word processing (i.e. Office(TM) work) in Windows in your standard MS software suite, using emacs and vi for scripting and pounding out txt files, but I've been looking for a reason to jump ship to a Linux Office Suite (old KOffice wasn't as streamlined as I'd have wanted, and I've always worried about file compatibility)
The only thing that still concerns me is that it feels like Microsoft could suddenly, spontaneously create a new file format.MSOnly or something and then all the other word processors would be stuck trying to implement support for it (not that it would be so easy to do, or would even happen). What's going to happen if MS does create some new file format? I wouldn't put it past them.
Yeah, but there's also going to be a diffusion of responsibility in these circumstances even if the corporation, or the individuals involved will get prosecuted the same. One person kills somebody and that person will be fully accountable for what they individually did. A mob of 30 people collectively kill a person, or incite one member to kill another will also result in a conviction, sure. But that's likely going to be put largely on one person (perhaps the actual perpetrator) and the others will probably get off on plea bargains, testimonial immunity, or lesser charges (because they didn't pull the trigger. That doesn't make it okay.
If a corporation is dumping poison into some water it's true, there is somebody somewhere who signed the papers or who gave the signal to do so, but that doesn't mean, I figure, that we should ignore the other malicious and greedy "mob members" (i.e. shareholders, executives -- redundant, since they are likely shareholders -- etc.) who were shouting and throwing their arms up demanding higher returns. What'll happen is the corporation will be assessed a fine (because the government can, and could use the money, whereas an individual poisoning the water doesn't have deep pockets) and *maybe* the executive in charge will see some other ramifications.
What I'm saying, though, is what makes corporations so evidently forgiveable is that the law operates more directly on people than entities (you can't put GE away for life, i.e.), and there are so many guilty parties that it's impossible to pin down any one perpetrator. I would feel guilty about forcing an 8-year-old to make clothing for me, but as a greedy investor in Nike I would effectively be stating "make me money at all costs" and feel much less guilt when they violate human rights.
One normal person kills another, and they'll feel the full guilt of it, and the law will acknowledge their full guilt. Several hundred thousand people contribute collectively kill even a handful of people, any one person will feel hardly any guilt (likely) and the law will similarly have difficulty assessing any guilt. Guilt is usually in the form of a fine, and people aren't too upset when they have to pony $20 after saving $10 for the past 10 years (especially since the insiders and the savvy investors might have dumped stock, also).
Corporations are treated differently because, frankly, they are different, and act on a completely different basis than regular people. I would never do the things that many of these corporations do. Not many people would.
Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.
But corporations do possibly reach a point where they become the sort of "faceless" entities that they are. The reason why many people get upset at corporations and the things that they do is that they quite frequently assume a sort of "mob mentality" where many people backing a certain interest seems to validate that interest (though the largest interest we discuss is greed). The problem with these sorts of things is that most frequently it ends up very much in one person's interest and moderately (if that) in anybody else's.
Corporations benefit strongly the executives and the investors (especially large "bankish" ones, how much more faceless can you get?) and they use the "we're worth billions of dollars, employ thousands of people, make useful products" basis to ruin the environment/take advantage of third world labor/commit corporate scandals. Simply because a corporation employs thousands of people and pays tehm and everything does not mean that they have everybody's interests in mind. They likely don't. Hell, it doesn't even mean that they necessarily have the employees' interests in mind (as we've seen). Corporations are not iron-clad.
Hell look at the "corporation" of Communism in China and Russia.
You caught me. The truth is that I have four cars, but I don't use them. I just leave them running all day and night with tubes connected from their gas tanks to my local Shell.
Perhaps surprisingly my first car, a 1987 VW Golf (it was 1998 when I got it), did pretty well, for what it was.
It was a hideous white boxy thing (boxy's not my style, really) with barely any heat, and the door handle just snapped off in the winter, but it was great. I learned stick on that and, as I learned by trial and error, I abused the hell out of that car and it still hung in there the whole way.
Great fun to drive, but I guess I'm wasting time reminiscing here.
I *am* an American, but I don't have a car (live/work in San Francisco) and Im glad I don't have one. When I was in Europe I'll say that I wasn't really turned on by how small and boxy European cars tended to appear. Obviously this is somewhat a product of culture and also one of necessity (Europe was not designed so car-centric as America as much of the major cities were well-established long before the car -- the same cannot be said of many American cities).
American cars, big, sloopy, intimidating are likewise probably very appealing to many Americans and not to you Europeans. Just a cultural thing. I will say, however, that Hummers have had some substantial maintenance issues (not only expensive to maintain, but kind of a POS when mass produced). And, come on, wood paneled wagons went out with the 80s, we *are* a little better than that.
Well, of course the ACLU is involved. In fact, the Humanitarian Law Project is probably just an ACLU offshoot, like Labor organizations or the Communist party. (Yes, I'm kidding, no I'm not a Red).
As far as your rant, last time I checked the ACLU was paying a bunch of money to ensure that babies weren't secretly being killed (in alleyways and such), but rather in a controlled and clean setting. Right, it's a horrible characterization and not much of a defense...
But I think that building an arsenal of patents for ammunition is like stockpiling nukes for National Defense. During peacetime everything will be fine, but if litigation starts (i.e. as in now), then all hell breaks loose.
You want a pissing contest? IBM's game. And so is SCO, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and all of the big players. All you'll need to do is put your lawyers to work and pay some processing feed.
Sure IBM (i.e. "America" in this analogy) is the major superpower with zillions of patents that might be able to sink all these other companies with all of the patents they've accumulated, but these other companies do have patents also and might be able to call IBM out on some of them also.
So, if IBM starts a shopping spree of patents, even if the goal is merely to have them so others cannot, it could lead to an arms race of IP where companies focus more on locking up patents than actual innovation or business (and become one of the patent-litigation firms that has become notorious on slashdot).
Call me a pessimist, but we could very possibly see other companies rush to patent everything under the sun, just to gain some power. Then every company will have its hands tied by all of the patents they don't own, and it'll be a nuclear winter of technology.
And even with IBM's good intentions, whose to say that IBM's strategy won't incite some Hussein in some rogue company to make some ridiculous claims about their IP and assert that they've got some sort of clout or power when they actually don't? And then IBM would have to try to step in and break it up, but not before damage has been done to our community. Oh, wait... we've already got a Hussein at our rogue company.
IBM will win whatever comes to them, don't doubt this, but winning might not be the best thing for technology.
Slashdot Mirror
then you have to hope you actually like the person you married.
So I guess you have to like people first, huh?
Damn you, high school years!
... they just reboot.
That may be so, but I don't know if IE has an extension or an option that makes it so easy as clicking a button on the toolbar. Without the extension for Firebird it's still sort of a hassle, where I have to open up the right menu and navigate a tree of options. I checked and it doesn't seem to me that you can just add the option to the toolbar. Can anybody correct me on this?
I guess it's just a sign of the times. Previously, it seems that nobody had to worry about diseases and a criminal history and everything (well, diseases because we didn't know many of them existed), but this is certainly because people wouldn't travel as much and tended to know their dates for a long time before they began dating.
Now, people are dating others whom they haven't even met, and who might be only telling lies to them, so clearly there's a need for this.
It's like an incorporation of romance and love. If you're running a small business or a small store, you will very likely know your customers (and employees) very well and be able to trust them without too many problems, but when business scale up and become increasingly large, there's no way that you can account for all of the people, or know them personally, and so there's record-keeping and spying and every such thing.
Obviously with online (or more anonymous) dating you have access to so many more potential mates, which improves selection and makes things somewhat easier, but all the anonymity and deception makes me wonder if this whole trend is actually a good thing or not.
But all this doesn't affect me. Joining slashdot is like taking a vow of celibacy.
If only you used Firebird with the downloadable Preferences bar to surf with images disabled. It helps when you incidentally stumble into some questionable material at work or anywhere else. You can RealDoll all day and just see blocks in place of images. That is, until your sysadmin starts checking access logs.
It kind of reminds me of how the Annual Hockey game is always North America vs. the World (even though the world has some good hockey players).
That's wonderful also and I think that the Internet and everything should also be more globalized, but the DNS servers are providing a resource that has a certain demand associated. Simply, the internet should be skewed to America because, for whatever reason (they are obvious), America likely generates the most requests and receives the most requests (though I don't know the numbers, maybe China is coming close?). Obviously, if nearly all of the surfing consists of Americans accessing American sites, then an extra server in Germany serves little utility (aside from alleviating, perhaps, accesses outside of the country).
So (obviously) establishing more servers in other countries won't globalize the internet any more, it's an indication (and a positive one) of some increasing global demand.
That is, unless Germany just wasting a bunch of money simply so that the world may pass the U.S. in Root servers.
You might get modded OT, but I was wondering the same thing. I haven't seen it really happen. Was ./ ./ed?
I don't see how you could buy clothing without trying it on.
I (and many other men, I'm assuming) do it all the time. We do the hold it up to our body thing (mentioned earlier), but frequently I'll just get my general size. Oh, I wear medium shirts so just buy medium shirts (especially if I stick with a certain brand). There's none of this garbage that women deal with where a size 1 at one place is a size 5 at another or whatever because pants are 33 inches in the waist and 34 inches long. Period.
I think that the problem with this is that it might be exceedingly clever if it weren't in between markets. People who simply don't care (for argument, I'll just say "men") might use it and take a look, but they couldn't care less if a store didn't have the feature, because it's not too influential in their decision. Those who do care ("women") wouldn't be satisfied with this sort of technology (especially if it hasn't yet been proven) and would insist on trying the clothes on regardless, to ensure the colors look right "in this light" or some similar thing, to see how the clothes hang, how they move when she walks or whatever.
It's like selling the hybrid manual/automatic gearshifts in cars (though I don't know if this has been at all successful). Those who hate having to worry about shifting would just as soon go with an automatic, and those who really enjoy the control and fun of driving a manual would probably prefer a manual (of course). So I don't know if it's a winning tactic trying to market to this middle, "grey" market where there might not actually be many people.
... well, actually money that they were going to lose anyway. It's brilliant, actually. SCO is mired in this horrific, indefensible, and losing legal, so why not just pony up $25K of money the market's going to steal from them to look like they're going out as heroes?
It's like a king who's about to be overthrown using the treasury (the people's coffers) to buy himself some nice clothes to get overthrown in.
1) India
... well ... it just leads the paranoid Americans to wonder who'll be next in sniping the American economy. Stay tuned.
2) China
3) Mexico
4) Everybody else
Well, in this update, India's really stormed the scene, knocking off the previous leaders. What happened to China and Mexico? I thought NAFTA and China's induction into
Wonderful point, though the "raping" metaphor is a little jarring. Free trade, just like good credit, or anything such open transfer of some good only works if it is reciprocated. If I extend you all the faith and credit in the world, and you lie and cheat to me every chance you get, I lose whatever I trusted you with and you won't be able to get any credit any more. Things would likely have been better if we were both open and honest (and could have a sustainably beneficial relationship) or if we were both protectionist so I wouldn't have gotten screwed by you.
I.e. if one country exports a huge amount of a certain asset so that the country can make a lot of money and take advantage of the world's consumer base, but places huge tariffs on imports, other nations will likely try to establish their own protectionist policies, thus killing free trade (and likely hurting the selfish country's reputation, whatever). Likewise if a country strongly limits exports (who knows why) but offers completely free imports to give its citizens the best competition they possibly can, it will alienate businesses looking to establish in the country.
What's necessary is the free flow (both ways) of goods, capital, whatever (of course this is idealized) to ensure the balance between giving businesses a competitive advantage and giving its citizens a fair market.
America is freely trading its valuable resource (jobs) and India is gladly accepting them. However, India is certainly much less likely to send jobs to America and, from my understanding, should an American want to work in India (at an Indian firm) it would be very difficult to get a good job there.
So America is killing the competitive advantage that American workers had in jobs in the hope that American consumers would get more afforable software (could happen, or the execs could pocket the cash). And India is accepting all this inflow of capital from the jobs to better their economy and make their businesses more prominent and competitive, but this comes at the cost of their own citizens, likely. These Indian companies are not making any products or anything to directly benefit the Indian citizens (with their average income and poverty level, I'd imagine Indian citizens are not quite a strong market for iPods and such, correct me if I'm wrong), and rather they are more greatly stretching the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Certainly things weren't necessarily balanced before regarding jobs and the like, but it's my feeling that America's corporation-friendly open job market philosophy and India's (equally corporation-friendly?) protectionism are only going to do damage to the situation, in some manner.
Does that makes sense? It seems that the corporations just win across the board? That and the smart Indian tech workers, I suppose.
Simple Adam Smith, huh? Well, if you look at it from a macroeconomic perspective, there is a significant potential for loss here. Yes, they will work for less money which makes sense from a business standpoint, but any income sent overseas is capital that the country is losing. So where are these benefits? Well, lower salaries allow the money-makers to produce more cheaply and either pocket a greater margin, or tinker the price to maximize profits. Pretty good things for that guy, of course. But monopolies and misinformation (i.e. insider trading) are also good for the guy in charge. So the investors and shareholders are making more money, but you might have losers here. The people losing their jobs are (obviously) definite losers. But perhaps also the economy. If America makes this software, or provides IT services more affordably such that the American economy can make up the difference by opening the market to other countries, then maybe the country can benefit (i.e. cheaper software allows a company to sell in China, which yields significant inflow of cash). However, if the outsourcing doesn't bring in more capital than is lost, the effect is stereotypically "bad". America loses valuable capital that could be invested in the economy (in the form of American income and taxes from that income) and it stratifies the country even more (a middle-class person loses their job and becomes more poor, a wealthy executive pockets a higher margin and becomes even wealthier). So America's poorer and the wealth gap is even greater. That's great economics.
Of course, from a microeconomic point of view, it makes perfect sense to the executive, right? Well, yes. But then there is also the well-cited example of Dell pulling its call centers back to America. You forget the intangibles (things that economists too frequently skim over while also greatly emphasizing). These things aggravate economists because they are obviously so important and yet not measurable in cash value (or not easily measurable). We're talking lost business due to quality, even language, or any other such thing. Or perhaps the ripple effect of a weakened economy, or any other such thing that makes anything unappealing, outside of a bottom-line point of view. I am a software engineer, and I'm not going to proclaim this as the Apocalypse, necessarily, but I think economically, you're "Adam Smith" perspective is either flawed or too limited. We have had economic developments since The Wealth of Nations, i.e. Keynes vs. oh, who's the other guy?
Bottom line, this could certainly be a bad thing not only for the people who lose their jobs. It could be bad for the country.
We get something like KWindows and Microsoft sues? I'm surprised that they haven't gotten in a fit already over their trademarking "Office" (or is the Trademark Microsoft Office).
.MSOnly or something and then all the other word processors would be stuck trying to implement support for it (not that it would be so easy to do, or would even happen). What's going to happen if MS does create some new file format? I wouldn't put it past them.
Hopefully everything will have been streamlined so that the importing and extension compatibility won't be an issue.
Though I may not be entirely proud of it, though, I've done most of my word processing (i.e. Office(TM) work) in Windows in your standard MS software suite, using emacs and vi for scripting and pounding out txt files, but I've been looking for a reason to jump ship to a Linux Office Suite (old KOffice wasn't as streamlined as I'd have wanted, and I've always worried about file compatibility)
The only thing that still concerns me is that it feels like Microsoft could suddenly, spontaneously create a new file format
Yeah, but there's also going to be a diffusion of responsibility in these circumstances even if the corporation, or the individuals involved will get prosecuted the same. One person kills somebody and that person will be fully accountable for what they individually did. A mob of 30 people collectively kill a person, or incite one member to kill another will also result in a conviction, sure. But that's likely going to be put largely on one person (perhaps the actual perpetrator) and the others will probably get off on plea bargains, testimonial immunity, or lesser charges (because they didn't pull the trigger. That doesn't make it okay.
If a corporation is dumping poison into some water it's true, there is somebody somewhere who signed the papers or who gave the signal to do so, but that doesn't mean, I figure, that we should ignore the other malicious and greedy "mob members" (i.e. shareholders, executives -- redundant, since they are likely shareholders -- etc.) who were shouting and throwing their arms up demanding higher returns. What'll happen is the corporation will be assessed a fine (because the government can, and could use the money, whereas an individual poisoning the water doesn't have deep pockets) and *maybe* the executive in charge will see some other ramifications.
What I'm saying, though, is what makes corporations so evidently forgiveable is that the law operates more directly on people than entities (you can't put GE away for life, i.e.), and there are so many guilty parties that it's impossible to pin down any one perpetrator. I would feel guilty about forcing an 8-year-old to make clothing for me, but as a greedy investor in Nike I would effectively be stating "make me money at all costs" and feel much less guilt when they violate human rights.
One normal person kills another, and they'll feel the full guilt of it, and the law will acknowledge their full guilt. Several hundred thousand people contribute collectively kill even a handful of people, any one person will feel hardly any guilt (likely) and the law will similarly have difficulty assessing any guilt. Guilt is usually in the form of a fine, and people aren't too upset when they have to pony $20 after saving $10 for the past 10 years (especially since the insiders and the savvy investors might have dumped stock, also).
Corporations are treated differently because, frankly, they are different, and act on a completely different basis than regular people. I would never do the things that many of these corporations do. Not many people would.
Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.
But corporations do possibly reach a point where they become the sort of "faceless" entities that they are. The reason why many people get upset at corporations and the things that they do is that they quite frequently assume a sort of "mob mentality" where many people backing a certain interest seems to validate that interest (though the largest interest we discuss is greed). The problem with these sorts of things is that most frequently it ends up very much in one person's interest and moderately (if that) in anybody else's.
Corporations benefit strongly the executives and the investors (especially large "bankish" ones, how much more faceless can you get?) and they use the "we're worth billions of dollars, employ thousands of people, make useful products" basis to ruin the environment/take advantage of third world labor/commit corporate scandals. Simply because a corporation employs thousands of people and pays tehm and everything does not mean that they have everybody's interests in mind. They likely don't. Hell, it doesn't even mean that they necessarily have the employees' interests in mind (as we've seen). Corporations are not iron-clad.
Hell look at the "corporation" of Communism in China and Russia.
You've got some good cleverness.
You caught me. The truth is that I have four cars, but I don't use them. I just leave them running all day and night with tubes connected from their gas tanks to my local Shell.
You like the Poster Children? Let's meet up!
Perhaps surprisingly my first car, a 1987 VW Golf (it was 1998 when I got it), did pretty well, for what it was.
It was a hideous white boxy thing (boxy's not my style, really) with barely any heat, and the door handle just snapped off in the winter, but it was great. I learned stick on that and, as I learned by trial and error, I abused the hell out of that car and it still hung in there the whole way.
Great fun to drive, but I guess I'm wasting time reminiscing here.
I *am* an American, but I don't have a car (live/work in San Francisco) and Im glad I don't have one. When I was in Europe I'll say that I wasn't really turned on by how small and boxy European cars tended to appear. Obviously this is somewhat a product of culture and also one of necessity (Europe was not designed so car-centric as America as much of the major cities were well-established long before the car -- the same cannot be said of many American cities).
American cars, big, sloopy, intimidating are likewise probably very appealing to many Americans and not to you Europeans. Just a cultural thing. I will say, however, that Hummers have had some substantial maintenance issues (not only expensive to maintain, but kind of a POS when mass produced). And, come on, wood paneled wagons went out with the 80s, we *are* a little better than that.
Me, I think I prefer japanese.
Well, of course the ACLU is involved. In fact, the Humanitarian Law Project is probably just an ACLU offshoot, like Labor organizations or the Communist party. (Yes, I'm kidding, no I'm not a Red).
...
As far as your rant, last time I checked the ACLU was paying a bunch of money to ensure that babies weren't secretly being killed (in alleyways and such), but rather in a controlled and clean setting. Right, it's a horrible characterization and not much of a defense
But I think that building an arsenal of patents for ammunition is like stockpiling nukes for National Defense. During peacetime everything will be fine, but if litigation starts (i.e. as in now), then all hell breaks loose.
... we've already got a Hussein at our rogue company.
You want a pissing contest? IBM's game. And so is SCO, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and all of the big players. All you'll need to do is put your lawyers to work and pay some processing feed.
Sure IBM (i.e. "America" in this analogy) is the major superpower with zillions of patents that might be able to sink all these other companies with all of the patents they've accumulated, but these other companies do have patents also and might be able to call IBM out on some of them also.
So, if IBM starts a shopping spree of patents, even if the goal is merely to have them so others cannot, it could lead to an arms race of IP where companies focus more on locking up patents than actual innovation or business (and become one of the patent-litigation firms that has become notorious on slashdot).
Call me a pessimist, but we could very possibly see other companies rush to patent everything under the sun, just to gain some power. Then every company will have its hands tied by all of the patents they don't own, and it'll be a nuclear winter of technology.
And even with IBM's good intentions, whose to say that IBM's strategy won't incite some Hussein in some rogue company to make some ridiculous claims about their IP and assert that they've got some sort of clout or power when they actually don't? And then IBM would have to try to step in and break it up, but not before damage has been done to our community. Oh, wait
IBM will win whatever comes to them, don't doubt this, but winning might not be the best thing for technology.
Maybe he's just patented "method of losing Slashdot karma as the result of redundant generic posts pertinent to a significant issue."
He might be tech savvy, so maybe we'll see MikeRoweMachines.com, or, being a Canadian, maybe next it'll be MikeRoweFish.com (groan).
Or keep a blog and call it WinDowesUpdate.com, but the only problem is that Microsoft gave up that domain after the DDoS, right?
They should try to keep them in stock. I ordered a Carol Moseley Brown, but it says that she's Out of Print.
And after the Iowa primaries, they should post a notice: Howard Dean [EXPLICIT LYRICS]