What a load of crap. Yes climate change is something that life (and almost certainly human civilisation) will survive. No it's not going to be fun, will cost a fortune, and will cause the deaths of tens of millions, mainly in the developing world.
It is a bad thing and if it can be avoided or mitigated then we owe it to ourselves and our immediate descendents (the next few generations, not a billion years down the line) to do so.
Yes and no. It depends what your aims are. If you have dreams becoming a large company then you will have to take this sort of risk, probably several times.
But there are thousands of small companies that exist for decades providing a good secure income for their founders. If this is your aim then taking large risks is something you should leave to those with VCs breathing down their necks.
There's nothing wrong with small, safe, organic growth, and not pissing off your existing customers can be a worthwhile reason for sticking to it.
Any and all exceptions you make in free trade is wrong and will cause a downwards spiral into total goverment regulation.
Completely disagree - a total absense of regulation would lead to something akin to feudalism - the established players in most markets would simply entrench their position more and more, they're aim would be to dominate their market more than to grow it.
The modern free market only came about because government regulation broke the monoploies of the established players. Too much regulation is a bad thing, sure, but no regulation is as bad if not worse.
is this becoming the new business strategy for technology companies that failed in their traditional business?
I think it's inevtable. When a public company goes bankrupt, it has to be wound up or reconstituted in such a way as to give maximum value to its creditors and shareholders. If it's sitting on software patent assets that are potentially worth money then those assets must be realised.
Since you're in that business, maybe you can answer a question that has been bugging me for ages.
I'm on the other end of the phone for these calls - probably take an average of 5 a day, varying from generic marketing or recruitment services, to suppliers who are at least vaguely in our industry. SOP is to give them an email address and get them off the line as quickly as possible. Generally they're polite and it's no more than a minor irritant.
What I don't understand is: why are the people selling phone services orders of magnitude more rude then anyone else? Any other cold call, when told they can only have an email address, will either take it down, or politely say goodbye. Anyone who is selling anything to do with phones will nearly always simply hang up when told they are not going to get put through to "the business owner" or "the person in charge of your phone system". It would only take a couple of seconds longer to be polite, rather than leaving me with a dead phone thinking what a rude little shit they are.
It's been going on for years, I'm sure there must be a reason for it, but I just can't figure it out. I'd have though a company selling phone services would make an above average effort to make sure their staff had at least a semblance of a good telephone manner..
Actually never -- if they did, they would be neglectful of their responsibilities as leaders to do the best thing for their country. However, sometimes it's best to forgo a short-term gain in favor of long term stability. In other words, by submitting to international law (or a body like the WTO), you preserve a system which you believe benefits you in the long run.
What you forget - or possibly simply don't know - is that outside the US many ordinary man-in-the-street people understand this, and therefore exert pressure on their leaders to respect international law. This isn't meant as American-bashing, just trying to point out that the last 60 years or so have left very different world-views inside and outside the US.
The concept of international law, and the UN as the organisation that enforces it, seems to be a joke in the US from what I can tell. They very much are not in the rest of the world - if you look at the massive arguments in Britain over the Iraq war, the lack of UN backing was a huge issue. Not being a superpower, it seems obvious to most Britons that we need the UN, and working against it is rarely going to be popular. It is perfectly understandable that the US sees the UN as that inconvenient organisation that stops them from doing what they want, but you must realise that this is a world-view that only the inhabitants of a superpower can indulge in.
If you're going to take the trouble, we might as well see the line breaks:
----------- *Stretches out* Okay, here goes nothing...
2006 October 13th
In regard to our company MR3 player prize virus infection
The Mcdonald's Co., Ltd. corporation August's recent prize promotion contained a virus in the MP3 player. It is possible that users could be infection just by connecting the prize to their PC. Therefore we ask that customers do not connect their prize MP3 player to their PC. In order to minimize customer annoyance we recommend you report the prize to us as soon as possible.
1. Summary of the Virus A Trojan Horse virus/worm/spyware was discovered on the MP3 Players. When connected to the PC the virus will cause "the Chinese memo pad stands up" (???), a message that the virus has inspected your computer and so on. 7 cases have been recieved of this virus infecting computers in the 12 days since the MP3 Players were given out.
2. Customer correspondence (1) We are informing our customers of the issue via direct calls to their homes, our companies home page, signs at our many locations and via local newspapers. (2) There is a possibility that connecting the MP3 to your computer alone is enough to cause infection, therefore we advise winners to not connect the Player to their PC.as for this virus there is a possibility of being infected by the fact that this prize is connected to the personal computer. We have also created an anti-virus and put it on our site in the downloads section. (3) concerning the MP3 player of the prize, making all item collect rapidly, as soon as to receive, be able to prepare you exchange with the new item.
3. Infection route of virus and cause of infection The marketing store branch of McDonalds in Hong Kong apologizes for the infection. Concerning it's cause we are currently investigating that. We apologize again for any trouble, in the future we will strengthen our internal security so this doesn't happen again.
MP3 campaign summary Of period: August 4th (gold) - 31 days (wood) [ prize dispatch target date: September 29th (gold) ] Prize item: Original music entering MP3 player The number of successful candidates: 10,000 people Application method: At the private portable campaign sight it inputs the serial number which is stated in the drink of L size during period, challenges in the game. (???)
As you can tell I had some problems in two areas, I honestly have no idea what in the world those are supposed to mean. This is a very rough translation, coming from basicly translating a bad translation, but it's better than nothing...
In, oh, just over twenty years, which is the time it'll take for the snails to crawl from Spain to menace Tokyo (which, as we all know, is the ultimate goal of everything radioactive, oversize or alien in this world).
Spoken like a man who hasn't seen the Guinness advert. Be afraid..
I think that's the right one - I don't have Real Player on this machine to check.
Speaking as someone who lives in western Europe, I'm pretty glad we didn't have to rely on Stalin to beat Hitler.
Best case scenario - assuming Britain stays free, stays in the war, and manages enough of a contribution to negotiate with Stalin - the UK, Belgium, Holland and some of France might have escaped Soviet occupation. We'd all have been in the USSR's sphere of influnce soon enough.
That wikipedia seems to assert that while seatbelts certainly reduce fatalities, maybe people have more accidents when they are wearing seatbelts because they feel safer, and this might cancel it out. It provide no citeations to support this. That artical links to this more detailed one which is one of the most once sided opinion pieces I've seen on Wikipedia. The top post on the talk page is titled "This Artical is a Mess" and has a reply to it that sums it up better than I could:
Most of article is the stuff of fringe opinion pieces -- not suitable for an enclycopedia article. The more than a hundred jurisdictions that have passed belt-wearing laws have a rational evidence-based basis for so doing. The more than a million traffic fatalities documented in the FARS data file provide no indication that belt laws pose a measurable increased risk to pedestrians -- anyone claiming that they do has an overwhelming obligation to support the claim with a data-based study published in a peer-reviewed journal -- there are many such journals dealing with traffic safety.
I do take your point of a delivery driver doing very short hops though, but I do think all that needs to be done is to tack "without good reason" onto the end of the law and leave it up to the good sense of judges and the police.
I can see why theoretically this might be seen as objectionable on a personal libery basis, but I think trying to maintain that position in the face of the obvious benefits provided by seatbelts, and by the fact that mandatory seatbelts do make a lot of people wear them who wouldn't previously, is untenable. IMO it's one of those issues where practical benefits have to trump theoretical ideology.
I just don't see this as important from a liberty point of view, but I am convinced that it is a law that saves a considerable number of lives.
Personally I agree with mandatory seatbelts and disagree with banning gambling. My justification would be something like this:
Mandatory seatbelts save lives - the evidence is clear that when madatory seatbelts are introduced, many more people survive car accidents.
You could equally say the same thing about gambling - banning gambling will reduce the very real problems that some people have.
BUT gambling, for many people is a pleasurable occasional passtime, if you ban them from doing it you are infringing on their life in a way that I don't belive can be justified by the good that you are doing.
I can't see that argument for seatbelts. If you don't wear a seatbelt you're an idiot, plain and simple, and I don't have a problem with the government making that sort of judgement.
If you can come up with a reason why not wearing a seatbelt could be beneficial, then I might well change my opinion, at least for tha specific case - for example the UK has mandatory crash helmets for motercycle riders, but permits Sikhs (who wear turbans for religious reasons) are exempt from this, which seems fair enough to me (although if I was a Sikh I think I'd make myself a crash-turban).
the thread certainly doesn't reveal Mozilla in a favourable light.
I dunno, I can see where the guy from Mozilla is coming from - Firefox is open source, and you can fork it or rebrand it to your hearts content, but if you want to call it Firefox then you need to use an approved version/submit your patches for approval. I can see that there could be bad consequences for the Firefox brand if they didn't enforce this, and a substandard derivative became confused with the main branch - remember a lot of Firefox users these days are not the sort of people who think very much about their web browser, which makes the brand very important.
The Taiwan-based China Economic News Service (CENS), an affiliate of the United Daily News Group, one of Taiwan's largest newspaper conglomerates, was founded on June 1, 1974, and dedicates itself to the promotion of international trade with Taiwan.
The reason why this is not a real solution to the problem is that there is little incentive to use it.
Theft of card details may cause you a temporary inconvenience while it is sorted out, but there is no way on earth that you will ever be liable for the losses if someone uses your card to make a fradulent mail-order/ecommerce transaction - which is all someone can do with the details you gave when making such a transaction.
The victim of mail-order/ecommerce fraud is the merchant (the card companies also do not cover any losses) who accepts the fraudulent card. If they have shipped goods, and the police do not recover them (I crack myself up sometimes) then they will get a chargeback and lose the product that they shipped.
Don't get me wrong, I salute you for taking the trouble to avoid innocent businesses being ripped off, but without card holder liability (which I'm not advocating in any way since it would pretty much kill ecommerce) it's never going to be used widely.
I'd like to see card issuers have a small liabilty (say 5% + no fees) on fraudulent transactions. Make it appear on their bottom line and they might start to give a shit.
At the end of the day the merchant who accepts the fraudulent transaction is in by far the best position to spot it, but they could use a little help.
Slashdot Mirror
Links? Citations to peer reviewed papers? Without those I have to assume you're just refering to the usual bunch of pseudo-scientists and paid shills.
Look I'm not saying it's impossible that the climate scientists are wrong, but there is a clear consensus among them.
What a load of crap. Yes climate change is something that life (and almost certainly human civilisation) will survive. No it's not going to be fun, will cost a fortune, and will cause the deaths of tens of millions, mainly in the developing world.
It is a bad thing and if it can be avoided or mitigated then we owe it to ourselves and our immediate descendents (the next few generations, not a billion years down the line) to do so.
Yes and no. It depends what your aims are. If you have dreams becoming a large company then you will have to take this sort of risk, probably several times.
But there are thousands of small companies that exist for decades providing a good secure income for their founders. If this is your aim then taking large risks is something you should leave to those with VCs breathing down their necks.
There's nothing wrong with small, safe, organic growth, and not pissing off your existing customers can be a worthwhile reason for sticking to it.
Completely disagree - a total absense of regulation would lead to something akin to feudalism - the established players in most markets would simply entrench their position more and more, they're aim would be to dominate their market more than to grow it.
The modern free market only came about because government regulation broke the monoploies of the established players. Too much regulation is a bad thing, sure, but no regulation is as bad if not worse.
I think it's inevtable. When a public company goes bankrupt, it has to be wound up or reconstituted in such a way as to give maximum value to its creditors and shareholders. If it's sitting on software patent assets that are potentially worth money then those assets must be realised.
Except it doesn't play on most things..
Since you're in that business, maybe you can answer a question that has been bugging me for ages.
I'm on the other end of the phone for these calls - probably take an average of 5 a day, varying from generic marketing or recruitment services, to suppliers who are at least vaguely in our industry. SOP is to give them an email address and get them off the line as quickly as possible. Generally they're polite and it's no more than a minor irritant.
What I don't understand is: why are the people selling phone services orders of magnitude more rude then anyone else? Any other cold call, when told they can only have an email address, will either take it down, or politely say goodbye. Anyone who is selling anything to do with phones will nearly always simply hang up when told they are not going to get put through to "the business owner" or "the person in charge of your phone system". It would only take a couple of seconds longer to be polite, rather than leaving me with a dead phone thinking what a rude little shit they are.
It's been going on for years, I'm sure there must be a reason for it, but I just can't figure it out. I'd have though a company selling phone services would make an above average effort to make sure their staff had at least a semblance of a good telephone manner..
What you forget - or possibly simply don't know - is that outside the US many ordinary man-in-the-street people understand this, and therefore exert pressure on their leaders to respect international law. This isn't meant as American-bashing, just trying to point out that the last 60 years or so have left very different world-views inside and outside the US.
The concept of international law, and the UN as the organisation that enforces it, seems to be a joke in the US from what I can tell. They very much are not in the rest of the world - if you look at the massive arguments in Britain over the Iraq war, the lack of UN backing was a huge issue. Not being a superpower, it seems obvious to most Britons that we need the UN, and working against it is rarely going to be popular. It is perfectly understandable that the US sees the UN as that inconvenient organisation that stops them from doing what they want, but you must realise that this is a world-view that only the inhabitants of a superpower can indulge in.
If you're going to take the trouble, we might as well see the line breaks:
//www.mcdonalds.co.jp/
-----------
*Stretches out* Okay, here goes nothing...
2006 October 13th
In regard to our company MR3 player prize virus infection
The Mcdonald's Co., Ltd. corporation August's recent prize promotion contained a virus in the MP3 player. It is possible that users could be infection just by connecting the prize to their PC. Therefore we ask that customers do not connect their prize MP3 player to their PC. In order to minimize customer annoyance we recommend you report the prize to us as soon as possible.
1. Summary of the Virus
A Trojan Horse virus/worm/spyware was discovered on the MP3 Players. When connected to the PC the virus will cause "the Chinese memo pad stands up" (???), a message that the virus has inspected your computer and so on. 7 cases have been recieved of this virus infecting computers in the 12 days since the MP3 Players were given out.
2. Customer correspondence
(1) We are informing our customers of the issue via direct calls to their homes, our companies home page, signs at our many locations and via local newspapers.
(2) There is a possibility that connecting the MP3 to your computer alone is enough to cause infection, therefore we advise winners to not connect the Player to their PC.as for this virus there is a possibility of being infected by the fact that this prize is connected to the personal computer. We have also created an anti-virus and put it on our site in the downloads section.
(3) concerning the MP3 player of the prize, making all item collect rapidly, as soon as to receive, be able to prepare you exchange with the new item.
MP3 inquiry Executive Office
Presently TEL. 03 - 5148 - 509924 hour systems
October 14th (Saturday) 9:00AM - TEL. 0120 - 221 - 04724 hour systems (October 22nd (day) to) TEL. 0120 - 221 - 0479: 00 - 21: 00 (October 23rd (month) from)
MacDonald
Home page Http:
3. Infection route of virus and cause of infection
The marketing store branch of McDonalds in Hong Kong apologizes for the infection. Concerning it's cause we are currently investigating that. We apologize again for any trouble, in the future we will strengthen our internal security so this doesn't happen again.
MP3 campaign summary
Of period: August 4th (gold) - 31 days (wood) [ prize dispatch target date: September 29th (gold) ]
Prize item: Original music entering MP3 player
The number of successful candidates: 10,000 people
Application method: At the private portable campaign sight it inputs the serial number which is stated in the drink of L size during period, challenges in the game. (???)
As you can tell I had some problems in two areas, I honestly have no idea what in the world those are supposed to mean. This is a very rough translation, coming from basicly translating a bad translation, but it's better than nothing...
They'll repeatedly crash into the back of them, but burst into flames and explode before doing any damage? This I've got to see!
I think that's the right one - I don't have Real Player on this machine to check.
Speaking as someone who lives in western Europe, I'm pretty glad we didn't have to rely on Stalin to beat Hitler.
Best case scenario - assuming Britain stays free, stays in the war, and manages enough of a contribution to negotiate with Stalin - the UK, Belgium, Holland and some of France might have escaped Soviet occupation. We'd all have been in the USSR's sphere of influnce soon enough.
I do take your point of a delivery driver doing very short hops though, but I do think all that needs to be done is to tack "without good reason" onto the end of the law and leave it up to the good sense of judges and the police.
I can see why theoretically this might be seen as objectionable on a personal libery basis, but I think trying to maintain that position in the face of the obvious benefits provided by seatbelts, and by the fact that mandatory seatbelts do make a lot of people wear them who wouldn't previously, is untenable. IMO it's one of those issues where practical benefits have to trump theoretical ideology.
I just don't see this as important from a liberty point of view, but I am convinced that it is a law that saves a considerable number of lives.
Personally I agree with mandatory seatbelts and disagree with banning gambling. My justification would be something like this:
Mandatory seatbelts save lives - the evidence is clear that when madatory seatbelts are introduced, many more people survive car accidents.
You could equally say the same thing about gambling - banning gambling will reduce the very real problems that some people have.
BUT gambling, for many people is a pleasurable occasional passtime, if you ban them from doing it you are infringing on their life in a way that I don't belive can be justified by the good that you are doing.
I can't see that argument for seatbelts. If you don't wear a seatbelt you're an idiot, plain and simple, and I don't have a problem with the government making that sort of judgement.
If you can come up with a reason why not wearing a seatbelt could be beneficial, then I might well change my opinion, at least for tha specific case - for example the UK has mandatory crash helmets for motercycle riders, but permits Sikhs (who wear turbans for religious reasons) are exempt from this, which seems fair enough to me (although if I was a Sikh I think I'd make myself a crash-turban).
The reason why this is not a real solution to the problem is that there is little incentive to use it.
Theft of card details may cause you a temporary inconvenience while it is sorted out, but there is no way on earth that you will ever be liable for the losses if someone uses your card to make a fradulent mail-order/ecommerce transaction - which is all someone can do with the details you gave when making such a transaction.
The victim of mail-order/ecommerce fraud is the merchant (the card companies also do not cover any losses) who accepts the fraudulent card. If they have shipped goods, and the police do not recover them (I crack myself up sometimes) then they will get a chargeback and lose the product that they shipped.
Don't get me wrong, I salute you for taking the trouble to avoid innocent businesses being ripped off, but without card holder liability (which I'm not advocating in any way since it would pretty much kill ecommerce) it's never going to be used widely.
I'd like to see card issuers have a small liabilty (say 5% + no fees) on fraudulent transactions. Make it appear on their bottom line and they might start to give a shit.
At the end of the day the merchant who accepts the fraudulent transaction is in by far the best position to spot it, but they could use a little help.
And lose a perfectly good excuse to play with a robot? Don't be silly!
Talk about damning with faint praise.. You didn't even call it innovative!
heh, that was a bit bitchy wasn't it.. sorry
No, I think we wouldn't bother telling pilots about them, and just let them take they're chances.
Seriously, who modded this Insightful??