First of all, a small business owned by one person (corporate or not) doesn't have any shareholders besides that one dude. THAT's why he can do whatever he wants
Yes, of course! You say this as if it's contrary to my argument.
Second of all, corporate officers are compelled to act in the best interests of their shareholders, but there's not law that says they can't make philanthropic donations.
When the philanthropic donation is contrary to the public corporation's interest, of course there is. My point is not that companies can't make donations; it's that they only do it if and when it makes good business sense. I'm presenting this in opposition to your assertion that the officials of public corporations "often" turn down money-making opportunities just because they're decent and moral people. (That's what you said in your original post. You're now saying that corporate executives have to do what the shareholders want, but the shareholders want decent and moral behaviour from the company more than they want a financial return. That would be nice, but it's a fallacy.)
If Bud didn't have any marked trucks to make a photo-op, and their marketing department forgot to issue a press release, is the CEO suddenly a criminal?
Bud's marketing department forgetting to issue a press release is not the same as the Bud CEO deliberately spending company money on something he knows will never generate a return, so that's a pointless example.
Think about it this way: If all of your shareholders agree that you should make an anonymous donation to a homeless shelter, you'd be breaching your obligations if you DIDN'T make the donations--they own the business, so they decide what goes. It so happens that MOST shareholders want companies in which they're invested to just make money, and the shareholders make philanthropic decisions on their own. But nothing says it has to work like that, and it often doesn't.
I completely agree with all of that except the last phrase, which is completely wrong. I mean, if you can name an instance when the shareholders of a major public corporation voted in favour of an action that they knew would lose them money, please do, but I've never heard of anything like that happening, ever. Or, for example, a CEO announcing at the AGM, "Our profit was significantly down on last quarter, but you'll be pleased to hear we built several playgrounds in underprivileged areas of New York." The fact is, close enough to 100% of investors in any major public company are there because they want their investment to increase in value, and every corporate official knows that. These officials are, for the most part, good and decent people, and they know that their companies must be (or appear to be) ethical in order to remain profitable, but they are not allowed to spend shareholders' money on secret donations. Thus, the reality is that every major public corporation is profit-driven first, and ethics comes second.
Wait, how is a publicly-held corporation any more responsible to its shareholders (or less accountible to the public) than a privately-held corporation?
A private corporation -- e.g. a small business owned by one person -- can make an anonymous donation to a homeless shelter just because the owner wants to. It is illegal for the CEO of a publicly held corporation to do the same thing. Office-holders of a public corporation are compelled by law to act in a way that maximizes the long-term financial return to their (many) shareholders; to do otherwise breaches their fiduciary duty. Often it is both ethical and good business sense for a corporation to engage in philanthropy--but this is not evidence of good corporate morals. It's PR.
As more people learn how to "block" ads on different mediums one way or another, the greater the demand will become to write and produce advertisements entertaining enough that people will want to see them
I wish you were right, but you're not. Or you're right in the wrong way. Marketers are well aware that people tune out ads, of course, and one solution is to make them more entertaining. But this is difficult, prone to failure, and too expensive for all but the biggest consumer goods companies. So they're moving toward the alternative: integrating their ads into the content. The idea is to make it so that you can't tell where the content stops and the ads begin: product placement, sponsorship, PR, and so on.
What we will get in response to ad-blocking is not better, more entertaining ads, but ads that are so deeply woven into the content that they're unblockable.
It gets better -- the alt text for the pics of the two Google guys is "Matt Damon."
This is surely the first time geeks have been mistaken for hunky Hollywood stars!
I completely hear what you guys are saying about the wrongness his actions... but still, it gives me the heeby-jeebies that they're going to send this guy to prison for typing.
FireFox has this ad blocker... Which is good and all, but at some point someone will point that out as something bad. Even if it still hits the advertiser's servers... Joe Consumer will be under the impression that this is not a "good" browser, developed by "good" people. Remember, chances are Joe Consumer does not care about adverts.
No way, you've got that backwards. Joe Consumer does not care about the business model of ad-supported web sites. He does care about being able to easily block ads. (When I talk to people about Firefox, this is always a big plus.)
I mean, when people watch TV, they don't sit through ads because it would be "wrong" to dent the station's business model, do they? They fast-forward or channel surf or do whatever they can to improve their own viewing experience.
That's weird; I just had the opposite experience (and I'm new to Linux). Bought a new AMD64 and installed Gentoo and WinXP on it. Based on what I've heard about hardware support on Linux, I braced myself for a struggle. But in both Gentoo and WinXP, about 90% of my hardware was detected without a problem.
Then I realized that with Gentoo, I could actually figure out what was going wrong with the other 10%, because Linux has logs and configuration files. I Googled and found out how to fix everything. WinXP, on the other hand, remains a mystery. Some things Just Don't Work. For the life of me I can't figure out how to tell what's going wrong.
It seems that if you ask a question about how to fix a problem in Linux, you get answers like, "What's your dmesg output?", to help you diagnose. But if you ask about problems in Windows, the answer is always "Try reinstalling." So with Linux, I'm discovering what the problem is, learning about my system, and fixing it. With Windows, I have a black box that works sometimes and doesn't work other times and I grope around in the dark hoping to fix problems by accident.
I'm also puzzled by your comment that you don't want to recompile the kernel. Maybe this is a Gentoo thing, but kernel recompilation is really easy. Most of my hardware hassles were the result of not enabling something in the kernel, so I can't imagine how I would have got my system running properly without recompiling it.
I don't see why business has to be about money and nothing else.
Because in order to finance substantial growth a business usually needs to go public, and a publicly listed corporation is required by law to act in the best interests of its shareholders.
That means every single thing the corporation does must serve its long-term profitability. To do otherwise is to break the law. Amorality is written into corporations by definition.
I'm genuinely concerned by Brown's article, but even more so by the community's response, which is to call Ken Brown an idiot and laugh the thing off. Even the Slashdot story begins: "Yes, I know it's getting boring by now..." as if every intelligent person can immediately see the gaping holes in Brown and AdTI's case.
The problem is that the community has almost entirely missed the thrust of AdTI's argument, and, worse, has failed to notice the danger it represents. The community has attacked the technical details of AdTI's argument while mostly ignoring the ideology. But Brown's new article clearly identifies AdTI's target--policymakers in the US Government--and these people will do the opposite: ignore the technical details and ponder the ideology. And to them, there will be an arresting argument here.
The key point AdTI makes is this: you can't trust OSS unless there's a big company or institution behind it. This is why Brown questions Linux's authorship; not to prove Linus is a fraud, but to muddy the waters sufficiently so that the answer is unclear. They are demonstrating not that Linus did not write Linux all by himself, but that we can't know for sure exactly who did.
And let's be clear: although Linux is the example, it's really the entire OSS movement in the sights here. AdTI wants to take software creation out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of corporations and institutions. It clearly draws an ideological line: software created by companies can be true open source, but software created by informal groups of individuals is "hybrid source," which means potentially stolen.
If the US government agrees, expect legislation that puts the onus on software creators to prove that their code is not stolen (in contrast to the current situation, in which the onus is on an infringed party to prove someone stole it). This would be a trifling matter for an organization with salaried employees, but onerous for groups of unconnected individuals. It could severely damage OSS projects that rely on code contributions from the general public, and make it much harder for new projects to ever get started.
Of course, when I say this is "what AdTI wants," I really mean that this is what the companies who fund AdTI want. They're talking about diverting billions of dollars, so the companies who stand to gain from this will make sure Ken Brown's words are heard in the right places in government. On the opposing side, however, we the community have very little money and influence. So our voice is at risk of going unheard in the places that matter.
The community needs to realize it can not laugh away Ken Brown. It must understand that the issue is not whether Linus wrote Linux, but whether any group of individuals should be allowed to come together, write code, and release it. That is one of the most vital issues we have ever faced.
A price on life is often arbitrary, yes, but there are good reasons for doing it. And so it is done, in many areas (juries determining damages, institutions deciding how much to spend on safety measures, etc). I think the general consensus of economists is an American life is worth around US$3-4 million. But all this aside, even if you disagree on the exact figure, it's undeniable that death is economically damaging.
And as another poster said, while evolution has been enormously important in bringing humans to this point, we are now foxing it in all kinds of ways (think genetic medicine) and do not rely on it for future progress.
I think yours is a very common view, but it's naive. The US has done good in the world, no question, but it doesn't stack up well against the endless vetoed UN resolutions and destabilized/propped up foreign governments.
This is not due to anything particularly American, and I agree that China, Russia, or Iran would be far worse superpowers. Rather, it's simply that the US government's sole duty is to serve the best interests of US citizens. It is not elected to help the rest of the world, does not represent them, and has very little incentive to help them. When foreign interests have collided with American ones, the latter have invariably won out.
Furthermore, it is in the logical best interest of the world's most powerful country -- which happens to be the US, but needn't be -- to corrupt or dismantle international law. International law gives every party an equal say and equal rights, regardless of military or economic strength; by contrast, the law of the jungle allows the most powerful country to do more or less as it likes. Hence as its power has grown, the US government has launched increasingly vitriolic attacks against the United Nations and pulled out of a wide range of international covenants.
Thus, the US may often be a force for good, but more accurately it is a force for what is good for Americans.
You suggest that the US could simply snatch the Middle East and bleed it dry of oil, but chooses not to because of ethics. But despite its dominant military, the US comprises just 4% of the world's population, and is sensitive to both casualties and domestic public opinion. The costs for the US of launching such an invasion would be unthinkable, and the US public would not tolerate it. This is what restrains more aggressive action, not the morals of politicians.
My point is not that the US is inherently bad, or even that a world dominated by a single superpower is necessarily bad, but rather that the US government rarely acts out of concern for the welfare of foreigners, and this is explained by entirely logical reasons.
Furthermore, the actors conducted half of the conversations at a normal loudness level, whereas the other half were exaggeratedly loud (as measured on a volume meter)
I think these guys have been conducting this experiment on the train I catch to work for the last two years.
I dual-boot XP and Mandrake, but frequently I wish I could use apps from both at once. When developing a web site, for example, I want to simultaneously use Paint Shop Pro (XP) and Apache/Perl/etc (Linux). It's a pain to reboot into XP just to fool around with a graphic.
This is a specific example; my general point is that it'd be very handy to be able to switch between all your favorite apps without having to reboot.
P.S. I don't think dual booting is "fraught with complications" -- maybe it used to be, but not any more.
Without IE, I am permitted to manually browse through all (!) MS downloads to try to spot anything I might need, but I can't get it to tell me which patches I need, based on the current state of my OS.
So it's a choice between two evils: I either keep IE (and its assorted security holes) or I give up the ability to scan for OS patches.
(WinXP has an automated system for updates, but I'm not sure whether it does "Recommended" patches or just "Critical" ones, it doesn't do drivers, and I don't like having to take it on blind faith that it's working -- I want to scan to make sure.)
(Again, IANAL.) It's appropriate that you should mention the NYT, because they lost a court case over a similar issue. It comes down to what "publishing" means. In print, it's pretty easy to tell: the NYT is allowed to publish copies of its newspaper, but you and I aren't. If we started making photocopies of the NYT and distributing them, we would clearly be in breach of copyright.
But on the net it gets fuzzier. Usenet posts are replicated and made available on a large number of unrelated servers around the world, each one of which can be considered a separate instance of publication. So when you post to usenet, you implicitly grant a license to pretty much anyone, including Google, to reproduce your post for usenet-related purposes. (This is imho. I don't think anybody's ever actually tested it by suing Google for breach of copyright. You could be the first!)
I agree with you that Gmail's TOS could include a clause that grants them a license to publish your e-mail; however it currently doesn't. That would unsettle an awful lot of people for not much benefit. People might be a little wary that Google can read their e-mail, but they'd be terrified at the thought that Google could publish it.
I think you have it backwards: Google has no copyright issue with usenet archives, but does with e-mail. When you write to a newsgroup, you know your (automatically copyrighted) work will be distributed throughout the internet, so there's an implied license. This does not exist with private e-mail, so Google cannot publish it.
Neither British or American English is entirely consistent, IMHO. Although I've always found it revealing that Americans generally consider groups (like corporations) to be a thing and Brits consider them to be a collection of people. But maybe that's reading too much into it.:)
What if it's not meant to work? I don't usually wear a tin foil hat, but the government must be aware that this is unlikely to do much, if anything, to stop terrorism. They do, however, get a nice database of the world's citizens out of it.
And if the next terrorist attack is carried out by a US citizen, well, who could deny that Americans should submit their biometrics to the database, too?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, of course! You say this as if it's contrary to my argument.
When the philanthropic donation is contrary to the public corporation's interest, of course there is. My point is not that companies can't make donations; it's that they only do it if and when it makes good business sense. I'm presenting this in opposition to your assertion that the officials of public corporations "often" turn down money-making opportunities just because they're decent and moral people. (That's what you said in your original post. You're now saying that corporate executives have to do what the shareholders want, but the shareholders want decent and moral behaviour from the company more than they want a financial return. That would be nice, but it's a fallacy.)
Bud's marketing department forgetting to issue a press release is not the same as the Bud CEO deliberately spending company money on something he knows will never generate a return, so that's a pointless example.
I completely agree with all of that except the last phrase, which is completely wrong. I mean, if you can name an instance when the shareholders of a major public corporation voted in favour of an action that they knew would lose them money, please do, but I've never heard of anything like that happening, ever. Or, for example, a CEO announcing at the AGM, "Our profit was significantly down on last quarter, but you'll be pleased to hear we built several playgrounds in underprivileged areas of New York." The fact is, close enough to 100% of investors in any major public company are there because they want their investment to increase in value, and every corporate official knows that. These officials are, for the most part, good and decent people, and they know that their companies must be (or appear to be) ethical in order to remain profitable, but they are not allowed to spend shareholders' money on secret donations. Thus, the reality is that every major public corporation is profit-driven first, and ethics comes second.
I wish you were right, but you're not. Or you're right in the wrong way. Marketers are well aware that people tune out ads, of course, and one solution is to make them more entertaining. But this is difficult, prone to failure, and too expensive for all but the biggest consumer goods companies. So they're moving toward the alternative: integrating their ads into the content. The idea is to make it so that you can't tell where the content stops and the ads begin: product placement, sponsorship, PR, and so on.
What we will get in response to ad-blocking is not better, more entertaining ads, but ads that are so deeply woven into the content that they're unblockable.
It gets better -- the alt text for the pics of the two Google guys is "Matt Damon." This is surely the first time geeks have been mistaken for hunky Hollywood stars!
I completely hear what you guys are saying about the wrongness his actions... but still, it gives me the heeby-jeebies that they're going to send this guy to prison for typing.
Ooh, I have novels on Amazon. Can we slashdot them so Amazon will remove all the bad reviews?
That's weird; I just had the opposite experience (and I'm new to Linux). Bought a new AMD64 and installed Gentoo and WinXP on it. Based on what I've heard about hardware support on Linux, I braced myself for a struggle. But in both Gentoo and WinXP, about 90% of my hardware was detected without a problem.
." So with Linux, I'm discovering what the problem is, learning about my system, and fixing it. With Windows, I have a black box that works sometimes and doesn't work other times and I grope around in the dark hoping to fix problems by accident.
Then I realized that with Gentoo, I could actually figure out what was going wrong with the other 10%, because Linux has logs and configuration files. I Googled and found out how to fix everything. WinXP, on the other hand, remains a mystery. Some things Just Don't Work. For the life of me I can't figure out how to tell what's going wrong.
It seems that if you ask a question about how to fix a problem in Linux, you get answers like, "What's your dmesg output?", to help you diagnose. But if you ask about problems in Windows, the answer is always "Try reinstalling
I'm also puzzled by your comment that you don't want to recompile the kernel. Maybe this is a Gentoo thing, but kernel recompilation is really easy. Most of my hardware hassles were the result of not enabling something in the kernel, so I can't imagine how I would have got my system running properly without recompiling it.
Or read this.
Actually, price discrimination (the selling of like goods to different people at different prices) is illegal in many market-driven countries.
In Europe, Article 82(c) of the European Commission Treaty outlaws price discrimination by an entity in a position of market dominance.
Here's the actual link:
http://www.send-safe.com/honeypot-hunter.php
Or click.
Because in order to finance substantial growth a business usually needs to go public, and a publicly listed corporation is required by law to act in the best interests of its shareholders.
That means every single thing the corporation does must serve its long-term profitability. To do otherwise is to break the law. Amorality is written into corporations by definition.
I'm genuinely concerned by Brown's article, but even more so by the community's response, which is to call Ken Brown an idiot and laugh the thing off. Even the Slashdot story begins: "Yes, I know it's getting boring by now..." as if every intelligent person can immediately see the gaping holes in Brown and AdTI's case.
The problem is that the community has almost entirely missed the thrust of AdTI's argument, and, worse, has failed to notice the danger it represents. The community has attacked the technical details of AdTI's argument while mostly ignoring the ideology. But Brown's new article clearly identifies AdTI's target--policymakers in the US Government--and these people will do the opposite: ignore the technical details and ponder the ideology. And to them, there will be an arresting argument here.
The key point AdTI makes is this: you can't trust OSS unless there's a big company or institution behind it. This is why Brown questions Linux's authorship; not to prove Linus is a fraud, but to muddy the waters sufficiently so that the answer is unclear. They are demonstrating not that Linus did not write Linux all by himself, but that we can't know for sure exactly who did.
And let's be clear: although Linux is the example, it's really the entire OSS movement in the sights here. AdTI wants to take software creation out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of corporations and institutions. It clearly draws an ideological line: software created by companies can be true open source, but software created by informal groups of individuals is "hybrid source," which means potentially stolen.
If the US government agrees, expect legislation that puts the onus on software creators to prove that their code is not stolen (in contrast to the current situation, in which the onus is on an infringed party to prove someone stole it). This would be a trifling matter for an organization with salaried employees, but onerous for groups of unconnected individuals. It could severely damage OSS projects that rely on code contributions from the general public, and make it much harder for new projects to ever get started.
Of course, when I say this is "what AdTI wants," I really mean that this is what the companies who fund AdTI want. They're talking about diverting billions of dollars, so the companies who stand to gain from this will make sure Ken Brown's words are heard in the right places in government. On the opposing side, however, we the community have very little money and influence. So our voice is at risk of going unheard in the places that matter.
The community needs to realize it can not laugh away Ken Brown. It must understand that the issue is not whether Linus wrote Linux, but whether any group of individuals should be allowed to come together, write code, and release it. That is one of the most vital issues we have ever faced.
A price on life is often arbitrary, yes, but there are good reasons for doing it. And so it is done, in many areas (juries determining damages, institutions deciding how much to spend on safety measures, etc). I think the general consensus of economists is an American life is worth around US$3-4 million. But all this aside, even if you disagree on the exact figure, it's undeniable that death is economically damaging.
And as another poster said, while evolution has been enormously important in bringing humans to this point, we are now foxing it in all kinds of ways (think genetic medicine) and do not rely on it for future progress.
I think yours is a very common view, but it's naive. The US has done good in the world, no question, but it doesn't stack up well against the endless vetoed UN resolutions and destabilized/propped up foreign governments.
This is not due to anything particularly American, and I agree that China, Russia, or Iran would be far worse superpowers. Rather, it's simply that the US government's sole duty is to serve the best interests of US citizens. It is not elected to help the rest of the world, does not represent them, and has very little incentive to help them. When foreign interests have collided with American ones, the latter have invariably won out.
Furthermore, it is in the logical best interest of the world's most powerful country -- which happens to be the US, but needn't be -- to corrupt or dismantle international law. International law gives every party an equal say and equal rights, regardless of military or economic strength; by contrast, the law of the jungle allows the most powerful country to do more or less as it likes. Hence as its power has grown, the US government has launched increasingly vitriolic attacks against the United Nations and pulled out of a wide range of international covenants.
Thus, the US may often be a force for good, but more accurately it is a force for what is good for Americans.
You suggest that the US could simply snatch the Middle East and bleed it dry of oil, but chooses not to because of ethics. But despite its dominant military, the US comprises just 4% of the world's population, and is sensitive to both casualties and domestic public opinion. The costs for the US of launching such an invasion would be unthinkable, and the US public would not tolerate it. This is what restrains more aggressive action, not the morals of politicians.
My point is not that the US is inherently bad, or even that a world dominated by a single superpower is necessarily bad, but rather that the US government rarely acts out of concern for the welfare of foreigners, and this is explained by entirely logical reasons.
Yeah, I waz just razzin' ya. I POKEd the C64 too, and dammit, I STILL play Archon.
LOAD "*",8,1 is not a program.
I think these guys have been conducting this experiment on the train I catch to work for the last two years.
I dual-boot XP and Mandrake, but frequently I wish I could use apps from both at once. When developing a web site, for example, I want to simultaneously use Paint Shop Pro (XP) and Apache/Perl/etc (Linux). It's a pain to reboot into XP just to fool around with a graphic.
This is a specific example; my general point is that it'd be very handy to be able to switch between all your favorite apps without having to reboot.
P.S. I don't think dual booting is "fraught with complications" -- maybe it used to be, but not any more.
I use Firefox on WinXP, but if I use it to visit Windows Update, I get:
Without IE, I am permitted to manually browse through all (!) MS downloads to try to spot anything I might need, but I can't get it to tell me which patches I need, based on the current state of my OS.
So it's a choice between two evils: I either keep IE (and its assorted security holes) or I give up the ability to scan for OS patches.
(WinXP has an automated system for updates, but I'm not sure whether it does "Recommended" patches or just "Critical" ones, it doesn't do drivers, and I don't like having to take it on blind faith that it's working -- I want to scan to make sure.)
(Again, IANAL.) It's appropriate that you should mention the NYT, because they lost a court case over a similar issue. It comes down to what "publishing" means. In print, it's pretty easy to tell: the NYT is allowed to publish copies of its newspaper, but you and I aren't. If we started making photocopies of the NYT and distributing them, we would clearly be in breach of copyright.
But on the net it gets fuzzier. Usenet posts are replicated and made available on a large number of unrelated servers around the world, each one of which can be considered a separate instance of publication. So when you post to usenet, you implicitly grant a license to pretty much anyone, including Google, to reproduce your post for usenet-related purposes. (This is imho. I don't think anybody's ever actually tested it by suing Google for breach of copyright. You could be the first!)
I agree with you that Gmail's TOS could include a clause that grants them a license to publish your e-mail; however it currently doesn't. That would unsettle an awful lot of people for not much benefit. People might be a little wary that Google can read their e-mail, but they'd be terrified at the thought that Google could publish it.
IANAL, but...
I think you have it backwards: Google has no copyright issue with usenet archives, but does with e-mail. When you write to a newsgroup, you know your (automatically copyrighted) work will be distributed throughout the internet, so there's an implied license. This does not exist with private e-mail, so Google cannot publish it.
Here's everything you wanted to know about collective nouns, and plenty you didn't.
Neither British or American English is entirely consistent, IMHO. Although I've always found it revealing that Americans generally consider groups (like corporations) to be a thing and Brits consider them to be a collection of people. But maybe that's reading too much into it. :)
So very true. I'm going to make up a "DARL HAS NO CHICKENS" T-shirt!
What if it's not meant to work? I don't usually wear a tin foil hat, but the government must be aware that this is unlikely to do much, if anything, to stop terrorism. They do, however, get a nice database of the world's citizens out of it.
And if the next terrorist attack is carried out by a US citizen, well, who could deny that Americans should submit their biometrics to the database, too?