While we're all bearing the "real costs" of our actions why don't we do it for real and adopt a 'loser pays' rule. That's right, you sue, you win, they pay for your lawyer most of the time. That's good but if you sue and lose, you pay for his lawyer(s).
This would preserve justice and weed out the idiot spectacles of people pouring hot coffee down their pants and suing McDonalds (maybe they should have stuck to grits).
The problem with lawsuit happiness is that it changes behavior in a very bad way. Imagine if computer programmers could be sued for every bug that causes harm. Brings, it right home, doesn't it.
The problem with this is that corporatism is a political system where the corporations have control of the legal system and while they don't hold a gun to your head, they pay off the politicians to do it for them. Corporations are the entities that play that game but it is possible to have corporations without corporatism.
Example: Try importing sugar. It's very difficult and there is a quota system that limits quantities. This is why all your US soda is using High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) because domestic interests (like local sugar producers and ADM) who benefit from expensive sugar got a law passed that impoverishes Central America and raises their profit. If you try to dock your large sugar carrying boat without the requisite paperwork, Archer Daniels Midland isn't going to throw your tail in jail to protect their HFCS franchise, the US Custom's Service is. But they aren't acting for the people but as corporatist puppets.
Someone moderate this back up. It's a serious point, succinctly put.
You can't seriously attack anglo-american free-market capitalism with all its downsizing/etc. without fundamentally attacking individualism itself. Laissez-faire is probably the most individualistic friendly economic system around and, yes, you are going to have downsizings, re-structurings, layoffs, even the occasional "re-engineerings." But the only way to prevent this is to employ the violence of the state to make them illegal. Corporatism is evil because it is halfway to the constant, soul destroying totalitarian violence of communism/fascism. By his point 3 Katz seems to be advocating taking us one step beyond the evil of corporatism.
That's the trouble with some of these fake individualists. They are statists who are just dissatisfied with who is on top.
Hmmm... Maybe this is targetted at a different audience? There *are* people who don't want to build a box and some of us out there have to support hundreds (even thousands) of them. Wouldn't it be nice to have a stable Unix based computer that could go out of the box?
Linux can be tweaked to achieve this but Apple gives a rich user experience that Linux just hasn't gotten yet.
Q: What year was DMCA passed? A: Public Law 105-304 was passed on 10/28/98 Q: Who could have vetoed this but didn't? A: President Clinton? Q: Who was the VP at the time? A: Al Gore, Mr. Internet.
Are the Republican's necessarily better? No. But lying partisanship is sickening.
The House passed DMCA via voice vote. You can't sort out who to blame.
The Senate passed it by unanimous consent. There you can just blame everybody.
In either case, committed members who loved freedom from either party could have at least forced people to identify that they were passing this travesty.
George Washington had a quote about government. I can't find it so I'm paraphrasing. Government isn't eloquence, reason or persuasion, it is force.
The only difference between the first and third world variety is the distance between the threats and the guns. Their essence is the same, as is corporatism's ultimate dependence on those guns to enforce their will.
There has been an unwritten contract between employees and employers that there will be a certain amount of personal activity allowed in the workplace. When this invisible line gets moved, (usually in the direction of less privacy/activity) people used to the old arrangement get peeved. Some quit or retire or start competing companies with the line at a different place.
I won't work for a company that does this sort of monitoring as a routine part of work without a salary bonus over my regular acceptable rates The size of the bonus required is comensurate with the intrusiveness of the monitoring. For example, it would have to be quite large for my acceptance of video cameras in the men's room (approaching infinity). If my workplace adjusted the policies without adjusting my compensation it would be time to polish my resume. If my employers did not let me know about monitoring before salary negotiations ended I would view that as badly as if they were to lie about my job description in the interviews in order to lower my compensation.
I think you have it wrong here. America isn't the ideal breeding ground at all. Europe, Asia, Africa are all better at breeding nasty, virulent corporatist organizations. The reason why America looks like the bad guys here is that free market principles mean that corporations get bigger, better, faster and when they turn to government for special rights in the marketplace, they can do more damage because of their size.
France, GB, Germany, Japan, all have a corporatist mold that still seems frightening to the average American. If you are on the outs with the national government don't even dream about making a decent buck there as a businessman. It's just that their corporatism has limited their companies' profitability and their own little domestic monsters often can't withstand the onslaught of the bigger US corporatist demons.
As for Africa, have a gander at Zimbabwe for the current state of african 'hostile takeovers'.
--start wrongheaded Katz quote-- This is, the natural, inevitable evolution of an era in which government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business; in which technology and marketing permit companies to grow beyond anything previously possible; in which markets race insanely out of control; and in which globalism has put many companies beyond regulatory oversight or moral restraint. --end wrongheaded Katz quote--
The problem isn't that Time Warner yanked Disney programming from its network. They have the right to do that. The problem is the network of local governments who have given Time Warner government enforced monopolies to build cable TV infrastructure in their towns and cities. It is a *crime* to start a competing cable company in these jurisdictions.
Corporations without government violence to back them up are held to a customer service discipline in the market. It is only when government helps corporations violate rights by giving monopolies or government fails to enforce the commonly understood laws against various corporations that corporatism becomes possible.
Microsoft is a criminal enterprise. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer should be in jail for what they did to DR-DOS amongst other companies (Palm being the latest victim to come to light) in a criminal RICO case that would have cleaned the stink out of MS without going through the farce of anti-trust. Fraudulent error messages, knowingly fraudulent claims of interoperability, these are Microsofts real crimes and if they had been brought to heel under classic fraud law, we wouldn't be faced with the specter of government intrusion into the day to day computing life of a majority of computer users everywhere.
DB
Re:The Forbes perspective is the only one that cou
on
Be to Drop BeOS? No.
·
· Score: 1
What perspective 'counts' or not is decided by each of us in our own hearts. You can decide to be a lemming and follow a herd or you can be your own man and follow your heart.
"The corporation made me do it" doesn't cut it as an excuse IMHO
If Be were to be really like NEXT then Be advocates have nothing to worry about. After all, look what happened to NEXT. Corporately they were bought out but technologically, NEXT's OS memes dominate the new Apple. What is Cocoa if not NextStep?
From a Forbes perspective, NEXT lost. From a true nerd perspective, NEXT won all that counted. I hope the ending of the Be story turns out as happy.
Actually, all you would need is a hardware solution. My DSL line (Telocity) runs its own dhcp server and I just set up TCP/IP on my Mac for DHCP and I'm done. There isn't any reason that a similar solution wouldn't work for satelite.
I have no confusion at all, thank you very much. I believe that when you run over a century of social experiments (let's count the pre-marxian communists/communards as well) and *every* single experiment fails miserably, it's time to admit that the underlying theory is not sound.
Communism is based on a profound misunderstanding of humanity, you admit it yourself. But you blame humanity for not living up to the theory, I blame the theory for not living up to humanity. The blood of 100 million dead because of communism cry out because there are still fools who believe in that evil dream.
Please get better glasses. As the article you refer to itself makes clear, their use of concentration camps describes two very separate phenomena. Your own reference shows that the political concentration camps were invented by the Soviets in 1917-18. This is what I was referring to and is partially why I don't use "concentration camps" for the British/US type internment camps. Don't get me wrong, these other camps are horrible violations of human rights as well but they are qualitatively different in that the camp administration is not actively trying to kill off the people in their administrative care.
Unless you want to make the case that Auschwitz was the same as the California camps where the japanese ethnics were interred during WWII I would just let it drop.
Anyway, Red Hat's CEO's expressed aim was to collapse to OS market! "shrink it to a few million a year" as far as I recall...
If that is true then he is unlikely to succeed because beyond the technology of making a stable, fast, efficient OS there is the entire question of the User Interface/Experience. Here is where Linux is falling down on the job so far.
I'm looking forward to see how Apple is going to make out with MacOS X. If it takes off, you have a business model that keeps the OS market alive as a commercial model for the masses and kicks Linux right in it's vulnerable UI guts.
(BTW: eat your heart out, I'm still up 14% on my AAPL)
You don't have to start a business by yourself, in fact you just need to get a team that, together, can run a business. It all depends on what you feel is important. Being free isn't effort free. The rewards are great, but so is the effort.
As far as risk goes, the greater risk also comes with greater rewards. And if you are looking at CompUSA wages, you can make more money just buying a commercial lawnmower ($2000US) and mowing lawns. In a season you will have made more money than at CompUSA and be an employer of others. I know the numbers on that business having recently worked with an Alpha/VMS systems wizard who recently closed down his own landscaping business because he liked inside work better (and took a pay cut!).
No need for anti-commuist propaganda, my family hails from Romania. I have personal friends who worked in death/labor camps under the Communists. The term concentration camp was invented by Lenin and first instituted in the "wartime communism" period of 1917-1918. As for dehumanization you haven't seen the real deal until you go through communist propaganda given out in territory that they control.
Please read will you? The idea that communism is evil is not even that controversial since the Russians opened up the Soviet archives and gave out all the necessary documentation to any academic researcher who wanted to document the truth.
You can call somebody a racist, sexist, homophobe and on slashdot, it's a good shot that you'll have people both offended and supportive. But an Outlook Express user? Now that's dirty pool...
(note for the funny impaired, this post was supposed to be humorous, it is not in any way an attempt to express opinions about the actual state of Rob Malda or any other person including that Anonymous Coward guy (though you do wonder how he types so many messages))
Well, start your own company. If part of your differentiation is that you don't do DNA testing you will find recruiting a breeze and steal away your competitors' best talent. As for software, the amount of GNU/GPL and other open source licensed code out there precludes "every" software vendor from doing this.
Walking away is a brave thing. Sometimes it is also very necessary. Bravery happens.
They were hanging, shooting, and otherwise butchering class enemies in 1917 all the way through the time when they hauled down the Soviet flag from the Kremlin for the last time. This idea that the Communist movement is a bunch of idealists or that Nazis had some good ideas but that jewish thing made them lose track of their positive accomplishments is a bunch of dangerous revisionism.
The Nazis were evil from the start. The Communists were evil from the start.
That being said, the idea that we're losing our own way in the US is something that I agree with. Fight the good fight but don't let the evil ones off the hook.
I have been on the receiving end of a false accusation to an FBI agent. I know that this is true because I saw the transcript of the interview (thus I know that the FBI did not take the accusation very seriously). It came to nothing of course as I am not, nor have I ever been an assassin in pay of a foreign government (take that Echelon!). But even today, I do wonder what is in my file and how much other crap is in there waiting to bite me who knows when.
The US, as William F. Buckley and countless others have learned, is a country where having a hostile dossier can be safely ignored as long as you keep your nose clean. But this is not the case everywhere and as government enlarges, it becomes less true here. The fact that an FBI agent is proudly standing up and saying "I am Big Brother" creeps me out only a little less than the first time I saw an actual unmarked black helicopter (This was at an airshow in Chicago) after hearing for years that these were just figments of right-wing paranoid conspiracy buffs and did not actually exist.
If you would like to actually do such a cruel thing, it is possible to boil a frog in a pan of water by slowly turning up the heat so that by the time the frog's little brain registers the danger, the legs are too cooked to allow for escape. Let's not be frogs. Inappropriate government monitoring happens, people do just make stuff up, and unscrupulous politicians can and do get the information (see Pres. Clinton).
Slashdot Mirror
While we're all bearing the "real costs" of our actions why don't we do it for real and adopt a 'loser pays' rule. That's right, you sue, you win, they pay for your lawyer most of the time. That's good but if you sue and lose, you pay for his lawyer(s).
This would preserve justice and weed out the idiot spectacles of people pouring hot coffee down their pants and suing McDonalds (maybe they should have stuck to grits).
The problem with lawsuit happiness is that it changes behavior in a very bad way. Imagine if computer programmers could be sued for every bug that causes harm. Brings, it right home, doesn't it.
DB
The problem with this is that corporatism is a political system where the corporations have control of the legal system and while they don't hold a gun to your head, they pay off the politicians to do it for them. Corporations are the entities that play that game but it is possible to have corporations without corporatism.
Example: Try importing sugar. It's very difficult and there is a quota system that limits quantities. This is why all your US soda is using High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) because domestic interests (like local sugar producers and ADM) who benefit from expensive sugar got a law passed that impoverishes Central America and raises their profit. If you try to dock your large sugar carrying boat without the requisite paperwork, Archer Daniels Midland isn't going to throw your tail in jail to protect their HFCS franchise, the US Custom's Service is. But they aren't acting for the people but as corporatist puppets.
DB
Someone moderate this back up. It's a serious point, succinctly put.
You can't seriously attack anglo-american free-market capitalism with all its downsizing/etc. without fundamentally attacking individualism itself. Laissez-faire is probably the most individualistic friendly economic system around and, yes, you are going to have downsizings, re-structurings, layoffs, even the occasional "re-engineerings." But the only way to prevent this is to employ the violence of the state to make them illegal. Corporatism is evil because it is halfway to the constant, soul destroying totalitarian violence of communism/fascism. By his point 3 Katz seems to be advocating taking us one step beyond the evil of corporatism.
That's the trouble with some of these fake individualists. They are statists who are just dissatisfied with who is on top.
DB
Hmmm... Maybe this is targetted at a different audience? There *are* people who don't want to build a box and some of us out there have to support hundreds (even thousands) of them. Wouldn't it be nice to have a stable Unix based computer that could go out of the box?
Linux can be tweaked to achieve this but Apple gives a rich user experience that Linux just hasn't gotten yet.
DB
Q: What year was DMCA passed?
A: Public Law 105-304 was passed on 10/28/98
Q: Who could have vetoed this but didn't?
A: President Clinton?
Q: Who was the VP at the time?
A: Al Gore, Mr. Internet.
Are the Republican's necessarily better? No. But lying partisanship is sickening.
The House passed DMCA via voice vote. You can't sort out who to blame.
The Senate passed it by unanimous consent. There you can just blame everybody.
In either case, committed members who loved freedom from either party could have at least forced people to identify that they were passing this travesty.
DB
George Washington had a quote about government. I can't find it so I'm paraphrasing. Government isn't eloquence, reason or persuasion, it is force.
The only difference between the first and third world variety is the distance between the threats and the guns. Their essence is the same, as is corporatism's ultimate dependence on those guns to enforce their will.
DB
There has been an unwritten contract between employees and employers that there will be a certain amount of personal activity allowed in the workplace. When this invisible line gets moved, (usually in the direction of less privacy/activity) people used to the old arrangement get peeved. Some quit or retire or start competing companies with the line at a different place.
I won't work for a company that does this sort of monitoring as a routine part of work without a salary bonus over my regular acceptable rates The size of the bonus required is comensurate with the intrusiveness of the monitoring. For example, it would have to be quite large for my acceptance of video cameras in the men's room (approaching infinity). If my workplace adjusted the policies without adjusting my compensation it would be time to polish my resume. If my employers did not let me know about monitoring before salary negotiations ended I would view that as badly as if they were to lie about my job description in the interviews in order to lower my compensation.
DB
I think you have it wrong here. America isn't the ideal breeding ground at all. Europe, Asia, Africa are all better at breeding nasty, virulent corporatist organizations. The reason why America looks like the bad guys here is that free market principles mean that corporations get bigger, better, faster and when they turn to government for special rights in the marketplace, they can do more damage because of their size.
France, GB, Germany, Japan, all have a corporatist mold that still seems frightening to the average American. If you are on the outs with the national government don't even dream about making a decent buck there as a businessman. It's just that their corporatism has limited their companies' profitability and their own little domestic monsters often can't withstand the onslaught of the bigger US corporatist demons.
As for Africa, have a gander at Zimbabwe for the current state of african 'hostile takeovers'.
DB
--start wrongheaded Katz quote--
This is, the natural, inevitable evolution of an era in which government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business; in which technology and marketing permit companies to grow beyond anything previously possible; in which markets race insanely out of control; and in which globalism has put many companies beyond regulatory oversight or moral restraint.
--end wrongheaded Katz quote--
The problem isn't that Time Warner yanked Disney programming from its network. They have the right to do that. The problem is the network of local governments who have given Time Warner government enforced monopolies to build cable TV infrastructure in their towns and cities. It is a *crime* to start a competing cable company in these jurisdictions.
Corporations without government violence to back them up are held to a customer service discipline in the market. It is only when government helps corporations violate rights by giving monopolies or government fails to enforce the commonly understood laws against various corporations that corporatism becomes possible.
Microsoft is a criminal enterprise. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer should be in jail for what they did to DR-DOS amongst other companies (Palm being the latest victim to come to light) in a criminal RICO case that would have cleaned the stink out of MS without going through the farce of anti-trust. Fraudulent error messages, knowingly fraudulent claims of interoperability, these are Microsofts real crimes and if they had been brought to heel under classic fraud law, we wouldn't be faced with the specter of government intrusion into the day to day computing life of a majority of computer users everywhere.
DB
What perspective 'counts' or not is decided by each of us in our own hearts. You can decide to be a lemming and follow a herd or you can be your own man and follow your heart.
"The corporation made me do it" doesn't cut it as an excuse IMHO
DB
Or he put the email of the kid he hates most...
I would bet that he's either just too young to charge, it's all a tragic mistake, or he's using this as a strange form of mass resume mailing
DB
If Be were to be really like NEXT then Be advocates have nothing to worry about. After all, look what happened to NEXT. Corporately they were bought out but technologically, NEXT's OS memes dominate the new Apple. What is Cocoa if not NextStep?
From a Forbes perspective, NEXT lost. From a true nerd perspective, NEXT won all that counted. I hope the ending of the Be story turns out as happy.
DB
Given the amount of time that government systems are out of date by, could it have been a pentium floating point error?
Grins and giggles,
DB
Actually, all you would need is a hardware solution. My DSL line (Telocity) runs its own dhcp server and I just set up TCP/IP on my Mac for DHCP and I'm done. There isn't any reason that a similar solution wouldn't work for satelite.
DB
I have no confusion at all, thank you very much. I believe that when you run over a century of social experiments (let's count the pre-marxian communists/communards as well) and *every* single experiment fails miserably, it's time to admit that the underlying theory is not sound.
Communism is based on a profound misunderstanding of humanity, you admit it yourself. But you blame humanity for not living up to the theory, I blame the theory for not living up to humanity. The blood of 100 million dead because of communism cry out because there are still fools who believe in that evil dream.
DB
Please get better glasses. As the article you refer to itself makes clear, their use of concentration camps describes two very separate phenomena. Your own reference shows that the political concentration camps were invented by the Soviets in 1917-18. This is what I was referring to and is partially why I don't use "concentration camps" for the British/US type internment camps. Don't get me wrong, these other camps are horrible violations of human rights as well but they are qualitatively different in that the camp administration is not actively trying to kill off the people in their administrative care.
Unless you want to make the case that Auschwitz was the same as the California camps where the japanese ethnics were interred during WWII I would just let it drop.
DB
I'm inclined to agree on the stupidity of the Ceausescu government. It was so stupid, it took orders from the Russians.
DB
If that is true then he is unlikely to succeed because beyond the technology of making a stable, fast, efficient OS there is the entire question of the User Interface/Experience. Here is where Linux is falling down on the job so far.
I'm looking forward to see how Apple is going to make out with MacOS X. If it takes off, you have a business model that keeps the OS market alive as a commercial model for the masses and kicks Linux right in it's vulnerable UI guts.
(BTW: eat your heart out, I'm still up 14% on my AAPL)
DB
You don't have to start a business by yourself, in fact you just need to get a team that, together, can run a business. It all depends on what you feel is important. Being free isn't effort free. The rewards are great, but so is the effort.
As far as risk goes, the greater risk also comes with greater rewards. And if you are looking at CompUSA wages, you can make more money just buying a commercial lawnmower ($2000US) and mowing lawns. In a season you will have made more money than at CompUSA and be an employer of others. I know the numbers on that business having recently worked with an Alpha/VMS systems wizard who recently closed down his own landscaping business because he liked inside work better (and took a pay cut!).
DB
No need for anti-commuist propaganda, my family hails from Romania. I have personal friends who worked in death/labor camps under the Communists. The term concentration camp was invented by Lenin and first instituted in the "wartime communism" period of 1917-1918. As for dehumanization you haven't seen the real deal until you go through communist propaganda given out in territory that they control.
Please read will you? The idea that communism is evil is not even that controversial since the Russians opened up the Soviet archives and gave out all the necessary documentation to any academic researcher who wanted to document the truth.
DB
You can call somebody a racist, sexist, homophobe and on slashdot, it's a good shot that you'll have people both offended and supportive. But an Outlook Express user? Now that's dirty pool...
(note for the funny impaired, this post was supposed to be humorous, it is not in any way an attempt to express opinions about the actual state of Rob Malda or any other person including that Anonymous Coward guy (though you do wonder how he types so many messages))
DB
That would be the last major Mac operating system revision before the current one.
DB
Well, start your own company. If part of your differentiation is that you don't do DNA testing you will find recruiting a breeze and steal away your competitors' best talent. As for software, the amount of GNU/GPL and other open source licensed code out there precludes "every" software vendor from doing this.
Walking away is a brave thing. Sometimes it is also very necessary. Bravery happens.
DB
They were hanging, shooting, and otherwise butchering class enemies in 1917 all the way through the time when they hauled down the Soviet flag from the Kremlin for the last time. This idea that the Communist movement is a bunch of idealists or that Nazis had some good ideas but that jewish thing made them lose track of their positive accomplishments is a bunch of dangerous revisionism.
The Nazis were evil from the start.
The Communists were evil from the start.
That being said, the idea that we're losing our own way in the US is something that I agree with. Fight the good fight but don't let the evil ones off the hook.
DB
I have been on the receiving end of a false accusation to an FBI agent. I know that this is true because I saw the transcript of the interview (thus I know that the FBI did not take the accusation very seriously). It came to nothing of course as I am not, nor have I ever been an assassin in pay of a foreign government (take that Echelon!). But even today, I do wonder what is in my file and how much other crap is in there waiting to bite me who knows when.
The US, as William F. Buckley and countless others have learned, is a country where having a hostile dossier can be safely ignored as long as you keep your nose clean. But this is not the case everywhere and as government enlarges, it becomes less true here. The fact that an FBI agent is proudly standing up and saying "I am Big Brother" creeps me out only a little less than the first time I saw an actual unmarked black helicopter (This was at an airshow in Chicago) after hearing for years that these were just figments of right-wing paranoid conspiracy buffs and did not actually exist.
If you would like to actually do such a cruel thing, it is possible to boil a frog in a pan of water by slowly turning up the heat so that by the time the frog's little brain registers the danger, the legs are too cooked to allow for escape. Let's not be frogs. Inappropriate government monitoring happens, people do just make stuff up, and unscrupulous politicians can and do get the information (see Pres. Clinton).
DB