So, Bin Laden is rational, and if the U.S. only complies with these three wishes of his, he'll call off the dogs and renounce terrorism, right? And in other news, I can get you a great deal on this big bridge in Brooklyn. The sanctions in Iraq were nobody's fault but Saddam's. He was told what he needed to do to end them and refused to do it. Humanitarian support was allowed during this time, so the only one killing babies from malnutrition was Saddam. Bin Laden never gave a rat's ass about the Palestinians until he found out he could use their cause as leverage against the West. As for the Saudis, there is a very good reason he wants the US military out of the country; to make it easier for him to launch terrorist attacks and overthrow the Saudi family.
This seems to be a trend for the "trustworthy computing initiative". I noticed that the much-hyped security features of XP SP2 consist mostly of the new firewall and popup blocker (which many people already had), along with more visible security reminders like that stupid shield that pops up when you download a file, visit an activeX using website, etc. It seems like they are trying to make the focus on security as visible as possible, without providing any real, useful details. I get the idea that it's more of an illusion of security rather than some massive overhaul of the operating system like they want us to believe. I have a feeling that this won't be the last of the MS security illusions that we see.
What were the WTC attacks genuine retaliation for? "Offences" against the Muslim people which Bin Laden never cared about until he needed justification for terrorist attacks? As for the atomic bomb, this has been debated for over 50 years now, but there is no way you can argue that the world would have been better off if the bombs had not been dropped. How many lives would have been sacrificed with any alternative? What would have happened if the Japanese hadn't been defeated?
Wow. I am going to save that link and repost it the next time I encounter a British poster complaining about the loss of rights in the United States. Looks like civil rights in the UK are not being taken away, but have been gone for a long time.
I agree that the more desperate a person is, the more likely they are to commit a crime, but there will always be criminals that are greedy enough to take whatever they can, regardless of what they already have. San Francisco has a very generous social benefit system for the poor/homeless, but that has not eliminated street crime that is mostly greed motivated. There is no safety net that could be big enough to completely take away anyone's desire to commit crimes, but at the same time we don't want to have a large underclass of people who cannot survive any other way and have nothing to lose by committing violent crime.
It's because stock holders don't care enough to complain. They all chase the growth stocks, which have to sustain an unrealistic growth rate to remain competitive. That pretty much requires some degree of book cooking. If investors were content with the idea of investing in a company for the long term, based on solid financials, and receiving a good sized dividend, a lot of this fraud would be stopped. And the company board would be crucified if they voted for a 30% pay raise to be given to a poorly performing CEO, since that money would have come straight out of the shareholders' pockets. For true corporate reform, reduce dividend taxes substantially to make dividends popular, then investors will make sure companies are cleaned up, since it directly affects their personal bottom line. Sometimes it really is good that people are motivated by money.
I think you have indirectly identified the real purpose of RIAA/MPAA lobbying. Their big concern is not the fact that kids are sharing the latest Britney Spears song or downloading the Bourne Supremacy. The means to do this has been around for a long time. The purpose of the industry trade groups is to preserve absolute control, and to make sure it isn't too easy for some independent distributor to become more mainstream and provide a convenient content distribution system. Otherwise, musicians might be less inclined to sell their soul to a record label and independent film producers might represent real competition to Hollywood's steady stream of crap. That is what keeps industry executives awake at night, knowing their empire might crumble due to "disruptive" new technologies.
Your IP address is already traceable when using most filesharing services, I believe. If not, then adding an email address is hardly going to make a difference. First, there would have to be a way to verify that the email is correct, or a user would just enter blow@me.com. Assuming it can be verified, a free email account can be set up from a different IP address (school, public terminal, work, proxy) and there goes the tracking capability. The RIAA chief is going to be awfully disappointed when he finds out how the internet really works.
This is what you call feel-good legislation. It makes the RIAA/MPAA lobbying groups feel like they're getting something for their efforts. Any technical person knows the law is meaningless (how hard is it to sign up for an annonymous Hotmail account?) and that it will not affect filesharing at all. But I say let the lobbyists have their petty victory. Maybe it will make them feel like they got something accomplished and they won't try as hard to buy a law that has a truly chilling effect. Wishful thinking, I know.
Speaking of distractions, the Palestinian issue is a red herring. The Arab world as a whole (that includes Bin Laden) doesn't give a rat's ass about the Palestinians. That's why they keep them living in refugee camps instead of letting them immigrate to surrounding countries. Lots of starving refugees make for good propaganda fodder as well. Having lots of poor, angry people right next to Israel makes recruitment for suicide bombers very easy. Keep in mind, however, that poverty only aids in the recruitment of foot soldiers, not leaders. Terrorist leaders are rarely starving or uneducated. Bin Laden never expressed any concern about Palestinians until he realized that doing so would earn him sympathy for his cause. Egyptian born Yasser Arafat has amassed billions of dollars that were supposed to go to aid suffering Palestinians. The support the US gave to terrorists against the Soviets, Iran, and the propping up of dictators was definitely a mistake that I hope our leaders learned from.
This has got to be the most underrated post I have seen yet. The push for companies to not pay dividends is the single largest reason for corporate corruption. Stock holders only want the stock price to go up, and aren't so much concerned about how that happens. When the bottom falls out, they sell at it's peak and then don't care when the price falls. This is inevitable when companies are doing absolutely anything they can to sustain unrealistic growth levels, which are necessary to attract investors.
Dividend paying stocks, on the other hand, attract value investors that are in it for the long term. They will resist having the company do things for short term profit that are bad in the long run. These investors take a greater interest in the company and are more likely to protest when the board votes the CEO a 35% pay increase, since that is THEIR money.
Lower dividend taxes will encourage less of the former type of investments I mentioned and more of the latter.
That's quite a stretch, to claim that the mere idea of a Bush presidency scared everyone into bailing out of investments and tanking the economy. Telecom lobbyists, and for that matter all lobbyists, are not stupid enough to base all of their efforts around one politician or party. You bet your ass they were out lobbying Gore as well. Telecom deregulation took place over a number of years, and was supported by Democrats and Republicans.
As for the Microsoft trial sabotage, this occurred due to Microsoft's massive lobbying efforts, which they only began to do after the guilty verdict. Bill really didn't see the point in political involvement until the breakup verdict, which was a wake up call to MS that they need to play by "the rules" if they want to play in the big leagues. See my earlier statement about lobbyists playing both sides of the field.
As for oil prices, I recall a large spike in gasoline prices in EARLY 2000. Who was president? Once again, the oil industry has BOTH parties in their pocket. I think it's clear that, had Gore been elected, things would not be that much different with the exception of Iraq.
I'd say it was both greed and stupidity. Some people were honestly convinced that they were on to something good and that they really would make a decent living coding HTML for a.com that sold pet food. They were foolishly optimistic, but I don't think they had bad intentions. The people behind the scenes, who knew exactly how the venture capital / IPO game worked, were as greedy as it gets. They were determined to build their house of cards as high as possible and bail out before it came crashing down.
That's odd. I've noticed Bush bashers are more likely to have a very selective memory when it comes to historical events. For some people, it would be shocking news to learn that Al Quaeda's first attack against the U.S. was not on 9/11/01. Anyone who thinks we should negotiate with Bin Laden obviously slept through history class when World Wars I and II were being discussed.
The government could crack down on most spam sources anytime they feel like taking the problem seriously. With all the business, tax code, interstate commerce, and other regulations on the books already, any spammer is bound to be violating a bunch of existing laws. And since many spamvertized products and services are fraudulent or blatantly illegal, simply prosecuting with traditional laws would be adequate.
If the IRS started auditing every known spammer with operations or residence in the United States, that would have a very chilling effect on spam. I'd bet my life savings that spammers don't report all of their income for tax purposes. If other countries then followed suit, spam would be relegated to the far corners of the world and easily firewalled.
What I'm curious to see is how this would affect "people who conduct large transactions online", who the article said were one of the target groups for this device. There are currently no plans to integrate this with banks or credit card companies, so how exactly does this protect peoples' account information? If bobbyjoe44@aol.com has an account at Bank One, I can still send them a fake "update your information" email, they put in their Bank One password and other info, and I get into their account. Meanwhile, the keygen thing is only protecting their AOL account and I'm cleaning out their bank account.
The only thing this really secures is AOL's bottom line, by preying off of peoples' fears and giving them something that makes them FEEL more secure online.
It didn't take me long to get bored with paying $5 for a book of ads with almost no useful content. All of their articles were obviously vendor press releases, or just plain wrong (remember all the "killer apps"?). With the internet, these magazines are now officially useless and I don't know how they've managed to survive all this time.
How about those new Comcast commercials "now with 100% Pure Broadband!" And it's a registered trademark of theirs. I'd love to hear what one of their phone droids would say if I asked them what Pure Broadband meant, but I'm not willing to wait on hold long enough to ask them.
True. I'm just waiting for Sun to pull a SCO so I can sell my stock for more than the current $3/share value. I've lost too much on them already and really don't want to sell at an extreme loss. Incidentally, did anyone else notice that Sun is sponsoring (in the form of banner ads) this article that rips on them?
The problem is, these people are in short supply. Most are only good at one or the other and cannot see the other side. But for those who have both talents, and understand both aspects of business, the potential (and the money) is unlimited.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't somebody pleeeze think of the children!
Slashdot: Promoting moral relativism since 1997. "But the Japanese were the good guys!" Give me a fucking break.
So, Bin Laden is rational, and if the U.S. only complies with these three wishes of his, he'll call off the dogs and renounce terrorism, right? And in other news, I can get you a great deal on this big bridge in Brooklyn. The sanctions in Iraq were nobody's fault but Saddam's. He was told what he needed to do to end them and refused to do it. Humanitarian support was allowed during this time, so the only one killing babies from malnutrition was Saddam. Bin Laden never gave a rat's ass about the Palestinians until he found out he could use their cause as leverage against the West. As for the Saudis, there is a very good reason he wants the US military out of the country; to make it easier for him to launch terrorist attacks and overthrow the Saudi family.
This seems to be a trend for the "trustworthy computing initiative". I noticed that the much-hyped security features of XP SP2 consist mostly of the new firewall and popup blocker (which many people already had), along with more visible security reminders like that stupid shield that pops up when you download a file, visit an activeX using website, etc. It seems like they are trying to make the focus on security as visible as possible, without providing any real, useful details. I get the idea that it's more of an illusion of security rather than some massive overhaul of the operating system like they want us to believe. I have a feeling that this won't be the last of the MS security illusions that we see.
What were the WTC attacks genuine retaliation for? "Offences" against the Muslim people which Bin Laden never cared about until he needed justification for terrorist attacks? As for the atomic bomb, this has been debated for over 50 years now, but there is no way you can argue that the world would have been better off if the bombs had not been dropped. How many lives would have been sacrificed with any alternative? What would have happened if the Japanese hadn't been defeated?
Wow. I am going to save that link and repost it the next time I encounter a British poster complaining about the loss of rights in the United States. Looks like civil rights in the UK are not being taken away, but have been gone for a long time.
I agree that the more desperate a person is, the more likely they are to commit a crime, but there will always be criminals that are greedy enough to take whatever they can, regardless of what they already have. San Francisco has a very generous social benefit system for the poor/homeless, but that has not eliminated street crime that is mostly greed motivated. There is no safety net that could be big enough to completely take away anyone's desire to commit crimes, but at the same time we don't want to have a large underclass of people who cannot survive any other way and have nothing to lose by committing violent crime.
Are you implying that the Enola Gay and the WTC attacks are morally equivalent?
It's because stock holders don't care enough to complain. They all chase the growth stocks, which have to sustain an unrealistic growth rate to remain competitive. That pretty much requires some degree of book cooking. If investors were content with the idea of investing in a company for the long term, based on solid financials, and receiving a good sized dividend, a lot of this fraud would be stopped. And the company board would be crucified if they voted for a 30% pay raise to be given to a poorly performing CEO, since that money would have come straight out of the shareholders' pockets. For true corporate reform, reduce dividend taxes substantially to make dividends popular, then investors will make sure companies are cleaned up, since it directly affects their personal bottom line. Sometimes it really is good that people are motivated by money.
If CNN is a right wing propaganda station, what do you consider to be balanced? Al Jazeera?
I think you have indirectly identified the real purpose of RIAA/MPAA lobbying. Their big concern is not the fact that kids are sharing the latest Britney Spears song or downloading the Bourne Supremacy. The means to do this has been around for a long time. The purpose of the industry trade groups is to preserve absolute control, and to make sure it isn't too easy for some independent distributor to become more mainstream and provide a convenient content distribution system. Otherwise, musicians might be less inclined to sell their soul to a record label and independent film producers might represent real competition to Hollywood's steady stream of crap. That is what keeps industry executives awake at night, knowing their empire might crumble due to "disruptive" new technologies.
Your IP address is already traceable when using most filesharing services, I believe. If not, then adding an email address is hardly going to make a difference. First, there would have to be a way to verify that the email is correct, or a user would just enter blow@me.com. Assuming it can be verified, a free email account can be set up from a different IP address (school, public terminal, work, proxy) and there goes the tracking capability. The RIAA chief is going to be awfully disappointed when he finds out how the internet really works.
This is what you call feel-good legislation. It makes the RIAA/MPAA lobbying groups feel like they're getting something for their efforts. Any technical person knows the law is meaningless (how hard is it to sign up for an annonymous Hotmail account?) and that it will not affect filesharing at all. But I say let the lobbyists have their petty victory. Maybe it will make them feel like they got something accomplished and they won't try as hard to buy a law that has a truly chilling effect. Wishful thinking, I know.
Speaking of distractions, the Palestinian issue is a red herring. The Arab world as a whole (that includes Bin Laden) doesn't give a rat's ass about the Palestinians. That's why they keep them living in refugee camps instead of letting them immigrate to surrounding countries. Lots of starving refugees make for good propaganda fodder as well. Having lots of poor, angry people right next to Israel makes recruitment for suicide bombers very easy. Keep in mind, however, that poverty only aids in the recruitment of foot soldiers, not leaders. Terrorist leaders are rarely starving or uneducated. Bin Laden never expressed any concern about Palestinians until he realized that doing so would earn him sympathy for his cause. Egyptian born Yasser Arafat has amassed billions of dollars that were supposed to go to aid suffering Palestinians. The support the US gave to terrorists against the Soviets, Iran, and the propping up of dictators was definitely a mistake that I hope our leaders learned from.
This has got to be the most underrated post I have seen yet. The push for companies to not pay dividends is the single largest reason for corporate corruption. Stock holders only want the stock price to go up, and aren't so much concerned about how that happens. When the bottom falls out, they sell at it's peak and then don't care when the price falls. This is inevitable when companies are doing absolutely anything they can to sustain unrealistic growth levels, which are necessary to attract investors.
Dividend paying stocks, on the other hand, attract value investors that are in it for the long term. They will resist having the company do things for short term profit that are bad in the long run. These investors take a greater interest in the company and are more likely to protest when the board votes the CEO a 35% pay increase, since that is THEIR money.
Lower dividend taxes will encourage less of the former type of investments I mentioned and more of the latter.
That's quite a stretch, to claim that the mere idea of a Bush presidency scared everyone into bailing out of investments and tanking the economy. Telecom lobbyists, and for that matter all lobbyists, are not stupid enough to base all of their efforts around one politician or party. You bet your ass they were out lobbying Gore as well. Telecom deregulation took place over a number of years, and was supported by Democrats and Republicans.
As for the Microsoft trial sabotage, this occurred due to Microsoft's massive lobbying efforts, which they only began to do after the guilty verdict. Bill really didn't see the point in political involvement until the breakup verdict, which was a wake up call to MS that they need to play by "the rules" if they want to play in the big leagues. See my earlier statement about lobbyists playing both sides of the field.
As for oil prices, I recall a large spike in gasoline prices in EARLY 2000. Who was president? Once again, the oil industry has BOTH parties in their pocket. I think it's clear that, had Gore been elected, things would not be that much different with the exception of Iraq.
I'd say it was both greed and stupidity. Some people were honestly convinced that they were on to something good and that they really would make a decent living coding HTML for a .com that sold pet food. They were foolishly optimistic, but I don't think they had bad intentions. The people behind the scenes, who knew exactly how the venture capital / IPO game worked, were as greedy as it gets. They were determined to build their house of cards as high as possible and bail out before it came crashing down.
That's odd. I've noticed Bush bashers are more likely to have a very selective memory when it comes to historical events. For some people, it would be shocking news to learn that Al Quaeda's first attack against the U.S. was not on 9/11/01. Anyone who thinks we should negotiate with Bin Laden obviously slept through history class when World Wars I and II were being discussed.
The government could crack down on most spam sources anytime they feel like taking the problem seriously. With all the business, tax code, interstate commerce, and other regulations on the books already, any spammer is bound to be violating a bunch of existing laws. And since many spamvertized products and services are fraudulent or blatantly illegal, simply prosecuting with traditional laws would be adequate.
If the IRS started auditing every known spammer with operations or residence in the United States, that would have a very chilling effect on spam. I'd bet my life savings that spammers don't report all of their income for tax purposes. If other countries then followed suit, spam would be relegated to the far corners of the world and easily firewalled.
What I'm curious to see is how this would affect "people who conduct large transactions online", who the article said were one of the target groups for this device. There are currently no plans to integrate this with banks or credit card companies, so how exactly does this protect peoples' account information? If bobbyjoe44@aol.com has an account at Bank One, I can still send them a fake "update your information" email, they put in their Bank One password and other info, and I get into their account. Meanwhile, the keygen thing is only protecting their AOL account and I'm cleaning out their bank account.
The only thing this really secures is AOL's bottom line, by preying off of peoples' fears and giving them something that makes them FEEL more secure online.
Yea, because it's nice and balanced, unlike that "corporate" media. Right?
It didn't take me long to get bored with paying $5 for a book of ads with almost no useful content. All of their articles were obviously vendor press releases, or just plain wrong (remember all the "killer apps"?). With the internet, these magazines are now officially useless and I don't know how they've managed to survive all this time.
How about those new Comcast commercials "now with 100% Pure Broadband!" And it's a registered trademark of theirs. I'd love to hear what one of their phone droids would say if I asked them what Pure Broadband meant, but I'm not willing to wait on hold long enough to ask them.
True. I'm just waiting for Sun to pull a SCO so I can sell my stock for more than the current $3/share value. I've lost too much on them already and really don't want to sell at an extreme loss. Incidentally, did anyone else notice that Sun is sponsoring (in the form of banner ads) this article that rips on them?
The problem is, these people are in short supply. Most are only good at one or the other and cannot see the other side. But for those who have both talents, and understand both aspects of business, the potential (and the money) is unlimited.