A quick look at some fun B.C. facts shows that B.C. is roughly four times larger than Great Britain (~950,000 km^2), has a population of 4.1 million people and comprises of 75% of the world's stone sheep population.
Hmm...I thought the United States had 75% of the world's stoned sheep population. How else do you explain the "we don't need none of them overblown 'rights' thangs, cuz we got our cable TV! I need another drag!" attitude you find so often in the U.S.?
It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.
While this is true, and while I agree with your general sentiment, it doesn't address the core problem here.
And that problem is that by outsourcing anything, whether it's to an entity in the same country or to an entity in a different country, you are intentionally throwing away control over the process in question.
It's important to ask whether or not the process being outsourced is a required part of the business. If it is, then it's probably something that can't be trusted to an outside entity. And if it's not, then perhaps one should consider ditching it entirely.
IT, for instance, is a required part of most businesses these days. While IT itself may not be what the company in question specializes, in, most companies would be insane to outsource their IT operations, because the consequences to the company of their IT processes being implemented poorly can be very high indeed. It's reasonable to get additional help via contractors and such, but only when there's direct oversight of the contractors by employees of the company.
This is why I tend to be against the notion of outsourcing business processes of any kind -- it's a dangerous, foolish thing to do. Any business process that is a reasonable candidate for outsourcing is likely to also be a reasonable candidate for dropping entirely.
Now, how does this relate to the original article? Simple: if the bank in question had kept the call center an in-house operation, they would have had direct control over the security procedures used to maintain customer confidentiality. By outsourcing, they intentionally chose to relinquish control over everything involved in running a call center (which includes how sensitive information is handled) to the company they outsourced their call center operations to. Now their customers are suffering the consequences.
If I'm not mistaken, the Milky way and the Andromeda galaxy will collide (or have a near-miss, I'm not sure which) about a billion years hence.
If both galaxies have black holes at their centers, and the simulation is correct, then I have to wonder what the consequences will be for life within either galaxy, as I would imagine the burst of radiation from the collision of the black holes (and the resulting quasar) will be deadly.
Anyone wanna chime in with some numbers?
Maybe the Pierson's Puppeteers have the right idea after all...
Minimum wage in Norway is equal to about $12.70/hr USD, and goes up by age (among other factors), so a 25-year old would be making a minimum of $19.84/hr USD.
$19.84? Man, if this isn't a backhanded reference to our new Norwegian information-control overlords, I don't know what is.:-)
So how do I prevent my neighbours from buying patented Monsanto seeds and planting them such that they cross-pollinate with mine?
Sue your neighbor for planting unauthorized seed on your property.
If Monsanto can sue you for shit that isn't your fault, then you can sue your neighbor for shit that isn't their fault, and cite the court case you (or one of your neighbors) just lost as precedent. Right?
If enough of that happened, then perhaps people would stop buying Monsanto seed due to the risk of being sued by their neighbors.
Of course, Monsanto's next move might be some sort of indemnification clause in the contract, in which Monsanto covers any legal costs incurred as a result of using their seed...
Lawyers are just like hackers, they don't make the stupid piece of shit rules,
WTF are you talking about? Of course they do. Who writes most of the legislation that gets voted on? Lawyers (corporate lawyers or lawyers for the special interest groups that bribe the politicians they're targeting, usually). Who votes on the legislation? Lawyers (most legislators are/were lawyers themselves). Who argues the resulting laws in court? Lawyers. Who judges the arguments? Lawyers (most judges are/were lawyers themselves).
Lawyers of one form or another are intimately involved in pretty much every step of every lawmaking process we have.
And these are people who often seem to equate law and ethics (and thus appear to believe that if something is lawful, it must also be ethical. I've heard more than one lawyer actually say as much).
Little wonder the rules we live under are getting more unreasonable and oppressive by the day.
This is a clear case of judges tossing out the spirit and meaning of the law and simply coming up with wild interpretations suitable to their whims. I expect this kind of thing from lawyers, but from judges, it's simply intolerable, and represents a gross corruption of our legal system away from the people and towards an oppressive government.
Uh, you do know that almost all judges were/are lawyers, right?
Today, bills are written by (usually corporate) lawyers for lawyers (the state or national congress) to vote into law, which are then argued in court by lawyers in front of a lawyer (judge) who renders judgement on the whole thing. These are people who often (perhaps even usually) appear to believe that there is a one-to-one mapping between ethical and lawful.
And people wonder why lawyers are able to charge hundreds of dollars an hour, and why the laws of the land are getting less reasonable and more oppressive over time...
Corporations cannot vote. Remind your Representatives/Senators of that in your personally written letters to them on topics which concern you. Even a single letter can get them wondering how many other voters think the same way.
No, corporations cannot vote directly. What they can, and do, is control the information voters get that determine who they vote for. They can do this because they own the media.
If I could trade that for the ability for corporations to vote directly, I'd do it in a heartbeat, because at least real people outnumber corporations by a wide margin. The ability to control what people see and hear (or don't see and hear -- you can't vote for someone whose existence you don't even know about) about candidates is much, much more valuable than a single vote.
The U.S. as a political system is a lost cause. There's simply no way to get from here (corporations dominating and/or controlling every aspect of lawmaking and voting) to there (a system where the voice of the people is loudest and is listened to and acted upon) short of violent revolution, and violent revolution cannot succeed against a government which controls a modern military. Bottom line: we're screwed, and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it. Better get used to it.
The thing is, if all they wanted was for people to go slow if there happens to be a cop around, then yes, using unmarked cars and disguises would make no sense. But what they want is for people to be paying due care and attention and not speeding even when there isn't a cop around to enforce it.
No, what they want is for more people to speed while there are cops around, in order to increase their ticket revenue.
Otherwise, they'd time the traffic lights so that you had to go the slower speed to hit them all green, or they'd increase the speed limit to match the speeds that most people are actually driving.
Before we had means to examine the universe in detail, religion was a decent answer. But that time is long past, and yet people cling to old beliefs.
What's worse is that quite a few of those very same people use the very same methods that science uses to deal with the world around them in their everyday lives, yet at the same time dispense with the results of science whenever they conflict with their beliefs.
You don't see these people asking "god" to fix their cars when they run out of gas, right? Instead, they go to the gas station and fill the car up with gas themselves, because they've learned through observation and experience that it's what they need to do. That's just an example, and it obviously involves human-made tech, but hopefully it illustrates the point.
It must be convenient for them to be able to pick and choose their beliefs without regard for anything but whether or not they like it...except for when the pesky real world asserts itself in their face.
How can you see little difference between two parties that have a stark partisan divide on about 90% of votes? Or are you referring to specifically copyright issues? If so, you're wrong there, too. Name a bill, and I'll get you the voting record for it. The Democrats have a much better copyright voting record
Okay, you asked for it.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And, I'd wager, the Copyright Term Extension Act.
The Democrats have a much better copyright voting record
Not where it matters the most, based on their DMCA record, for one, and probably the CTEA record, too.
Compare MS to ATT, when the latter had a monopoly on the phone system. ATT may have been just as ruthless, but the phone system always worked. And if anything broke, they would fix it for free.
ATT was a regulated monopoly, a rather heavily-regulated one at that.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is an unregulated monopoly. Let's face it: in practice, Microsoft does whatever they damned well please. If someone makes trouble for them, then at worst they just pay them off. Works every time. The only thing Microsoft is governed by is the market itself, and it is slowly isolating itself from that influence.
Microsoft doesn't fix their stuff for free because they don't have to. ATT did.
But of all the human systems tested to date, capitalism has proven to be best-immunized against corruption and abuse.
Well, not pure, unregulated capitalism. Regulated capitalism, perhaps.
You see, capitalism by itself encourages corruption and abuse. Consider, for instance, a society that operates under "pure" capitalism, and which has no laws against murder, assault, etc. A corporation which provides an essential good or service (such as food) in that kind of environment would literally eliminate its competition, by assassinating the owners and executives of any competing firms. Eventually that corporation would have no competition because nobody would be stupid enough to risk certain death in order to compete.
The reason things would go down that way is that capitalism encourages unethical behavior. Think about it: unethical behavior is basically behavior which does not follow a certain set of restrictions (e.g., on killing or harming others). Capitalism encourages this because it rewards those who are willing to go further to get what they want. Someone who acts ethically is restricting the set of actions he can take, while someone who acts unethically is not restricted in that way. The person acting unethically has available to him a superset of actions available to the person acting ethically. That means that the person acting unethically has more options than someone acting ethically, and some of those additional options will give him an advantage, and being unethical he will use those. Since the system doesn't have any built-in mechanisms to discourage such unethical behavior, the person who behaves unethically will win, pretty much every time.
Organized crime is what you get with unregulated capitalism.
Like hell it's not! Greed is the desire to get as much as you can regardless of how much you need or even how much is reasonable -- a cornerstone of capitalism. This is obviously a subjective term, in that you have to define "need" and "reasonable", but few people in the world would argue that anyone "needs" millions of dollars a year, and most people would label someone who makes millions a year but who wants even more as "greedy". Whether millions of dollars a year is "reasonable" depends on how it's acquired, and that is very relevant in the case of EA -- the people who are bringing in millions of dollars a year in EA are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone who is forced to work these "crunch time" periods.
What EA is doing isn't just greed, it's evil. Don't believe me? One of the definitions is "Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful". That exactly fits what's happening to the people EA overworks, and EA is doing so intentionally. And the reason? So that their executives can enjoy more of their million-dollar-plus compensation packages. Hmm...intentionally causing harm to others (the coders, in this case) in order to bring benefit to oneself? That's the very essence of evil.
It's simple. DO NOT WORK FOR A COMPANY THAT TREATS YOU LIKE SHIT.
If you are unemployed because of it, that's your choice.
I see. So you believe that the choice between working for a company that treats you like shit and having your whole family starve (due to being unemployed) is a reasonable one to have to make? What, are you one of the managers who works for EA or something? Because you have to be quite heartless to believe that such a choice is a reasonable one to have to make. All I can say is that if you really do believe that then I hope you wind up in that kind of position some day, just to teach you a lesson that you badly need to learn -- that the well-being of people matters, a lot, and to ignore that is to make things worse for everyone. I'd love to hear you try to explain to your wife that it's perfectly okay to be in a position of either working for a shit company where you don't see her and your kids for days or weeks at a time or starving. I'm sure she'll understand, right? If she's smart she'll divorce you for being a dumbass.
EA isn't obligated to hire someone. If they didnt exist the job wouldnt be there in the first place.
Well, so much for your understanding of capitalism, then. EA supplies something the market wants. If EA didn't exist then there would be a vacuum for that supply, and someone else would come in to fill it. In other words, the job would be there even if EA didn't exist. It doesn't automatically follow that this replacement company would treat their employees like slaves, either. They wouldn't have to -- EA chooses to, for whatever reasons (I happen to think that EA's executives are probably like you appear to be: evil, not giving a damn about anyone but themselves and willing to sacrifice everyone else around them to get what they want).
There's a difference between being obligated to hire someone (nobody is) and being obligated to treat them fairly and with respect once you hire them. You're not obligated to do the former, but you are obligated to do the latter. It's worse for almost everyone if you don't do the latter, so society at large has a big interest in making sure you do.
You ultimately have to decide who society should serve. Should it serve the few, wealthiest individuals within it at the expense of the rest, or should it serve everyone within it? Most reasonable people will say the latter. You obviously believe the former. If that's the case, then leave. The rest of us have no use for the likes of you.
Of course, in Real Life you might be quite a nice person and everything. But your words suggest otherwise.
The problem that dinosaur media has is: how do we put out a daily paper that's relevant to readers who are getting real-time news updates online? Answer: shorten the news cycle, rush to scoop the story, let others do the thinking.
Wrong answer.
Doing that forces you to compete against the other guy's strengths with your weaknesses.
If you want to put out something that's relevant to readers and which takes advantage of your natural news cycle, then lengthen your cycle and print in-depth analysis and coverage of the news. That way, you're providing something that the online news sources can't (because their cycle is too short) and at the same time giving your readers something they can use.
So, you truly believe that if a President were to order the nuclear incineration of Atlanta that the military who actually have to do the work would do it?!?
Somehow, I think not.
Why not? Military organizations of other countries have done the same sort of thing (on a smaller scale, of course) since the dawn of man. What makes you think the U.S. military is any different?
How do you think tyrants like Saddam Hussein manage to stay in power? He recruited his military personnel from the civilian ranks the same as we do.
All you have to do to convince a military organization to do something like that is to convince them that it's necessary in order to "win" the war against the revolutionaries. At the point where you'll be inclined to use such force, that's not likely to be hard. It's probably easier, actually, than getting your infantry to fight against the civilians face-to-face, since such a strike would be remote, the casualties a statistic.
It doesn't take much to convince someone that the enemy they're fighting is evil and subhuman. That's done in every conflict in order to make it easier for the troops to fight. The U.S. is no exception to this -- the civil war did happen, you know, and those very same psychological methods were used on both sides to convince the troops to fight. You're a fool if you think the current U.S. military is somehow magically immune to this. Believing that is like believing in Santa Claus.
But even without the truly heavy weapons, we're still talking about a many thousands to one advantage in firepower that the military has over the civilian population on a per-man basis, because the civilian population (right or wrong) doesn't have access to artillery, tanks, air support, satellite surveillance, and all the other things that are necessary for modern warfare, and you need access to those things in order to put up a real fight against an opponent that has those things. To argue otherwise is to argue that a country with a lightly armed civilian population doesn't need a military force in order to successfully defend itself from an outside aggressor (an outside aggressor has much less of an advantage over your civilian population than you do, since you already have a strong military presence within it).
Any government that is determined to stay in power and is facing a civilian uprising will do whatever it takes, including nuking some of its own cities. But it won't do that unless it feels it must. The U.S. government already has many layers of protection from violent revolution in place, mainly the various forms of "law enforcement", so involving the military would be a last-ditch effort on the government's part.
And we haven't even started talking about the difficulty the revolution (a very large-scale operation) would have in keeping its communications secret from the very government it's trying to overthrow.
While your average soldier has more firepower than your average civilian (at least, if you only count the soldiers at the pointy end - most soldiers are REMF in this day and age), it is not so overwhelming as all that. An M-16 (most soldiers won't have more firepower than this - the few who do skew the numbers quite a lot) shoots quite a lot faster than an AR-15, but doesn't hit nearly as hard as an M1A (civilian version of M-14). It tends to balance out.
What makes the advantage for the soldier so much greater isn't his personal weaponry, but the support weaponry he has available to him: air support, artillery, etc. How much of an advantage the soldier has depends on which weapons you wish to consider. It's millions to one if you account for the truly big stuff, like nuclear and biological weapons.
The simple answer is that Republicans take in a lot of money from the Media corporations and Democrats take in a lot of money from Media personalities (actors and executives). The computer industry is nearly universially pro-Patent and spreads money to both parties. Even big Linux-backers like IBM and HP are known for their patents.
It's even worse than that: the media corporations own -- surprise -- the media! That means that they control most of what voters see and learn about candidates, and that means that all candidates have to please the media corporations, otherwise they'll quickly find themselves the victim of the "Dean Scream" treatment. And since the media corporations almost certainly sell (in whatever form) their influence over candidates to other corporations, the end result is that almost no candidate in office will act against the wishes of the corporations. And big corporations like restrictive "IP" laws (because it gives them additional power over those with less money), so you'll find very few viable candidates that are in favor of less restrictive "IP" laws (unless they're less restrictive only for the big corporations).
This situation has no resolution short of violent revolution, and that can't succeed with the firepower advantage (thousands to millions to one, depending on which weapons you want to count, on a per-soldier versus per-civilian basis) the military has over the civilian population.
Better get used to more and more draconian "IP" laws (and other laws, for that matter).
it would appear that stricter emission controls actually create jobs as researchers and companies develop products to match these requirements.
Yeah, well, impenetrable tax laws also create jobs for those who write software to do taxes and who provide tax services, but you'd be a fool to argue that the existence of those jobs is itself a good thing economically.
The additional labor expended to meet stricter emission controls is an economic inefficiency, no two ways about it. Whether it's a necessary one is an entirely different question, and whether or not the emission controls themselves represent a net economic benefit is again a different question (offsetting the increase in labor required to meet the emission requirements are a reduction in health care costs and a general increase in well-being, both of which are economic wins).
Please, people, don't just equate the creation of jobs with economic benefit. The overall picture is quite a lot more complex than that.
Pollution control would create an entire new industry, but I guess that would be bad for certain entrenched industries so all of a sudden it is bad for the economy.
An entirely new industry which does not, itself, improve overall productivity or supply a naturally occurring demand (a demand which does not require the force of law to create) is not an economic improvement -- it's an economic drain. Otherwise you'd have to argue that the "industry" which has been created by the impenetrable tax law in the U.S. also represents an economic improvement, when it clearly does not -- such industries consume manpower that almost certainly could be better (in economic terms) spent elsewhere.
The only way this new industry you speak of can represent a net improvement for the economy is if it somehow manages to create production processes which are inherently more economically efficient (that is, require fewer total man-hours to yield the same production) than those already in place, and enough so that it more than offsets the cost this new industry represents. Incentives to find such processes already exist in most industrial areas of the world where large monopolistic corporations don't have primary control.
If you wish to argue that such an industry is a survival necessity than by all means do so. But don't attribute to it economic advantages that it doesn't have.
So the reason for not signing it is that it probably doesn't represent a net improvement but a net loss.
Of course, all this assumes that those countries which are subject to third-world limits in the treaty don't suddenly get subjected to first-world limits prior to taking on the industrial production burden described in the above message. It also depends on whether or not the first-world countries are already under the third-world limits, since if they're not then a first-world country signing the treaty will probably yield a net win even if the economic activity goes to a third-world country that has also signed it.
So whether or not it really ends up being a net win versus a net loss depends greatly on how the rules get applied and, of course, whether or not the signatories play by the rules of the treaty. It also depends on how the third-world countries are developing. If they skip coal and oil-powered plants and go directly for nuclear, then clearly their emissions per economic output unit will likely be much less than that of the U.S. despite their third-world status.
So wait, Kyoto doesn't go far enough. Therefore we shouldn't sign it. I mean, its a start, right?
No, it's not a start. I wish it were. Think it through. If the treaty puts first-world countries, which pollute less by any reasonable measure than developing countries, at even more of an economic disadvantage than they already are with respect to manufacturing and other high-energy-usage industries, then what exactly do you think is going to happen? Right: pollution in the first world goes down, but pollution in the third world goes up by at least as much, because even more (environmentally unrestricted) economic production will happen in China and the other countries which aren't restricted in the same way than would happen without the treaty. Hence, at least as much global pollution for the amount of economic output as we already have, if not more. In other words, at best no net win for the world, and quite possibly a net loss for the world, but a definite economic loss for the U.S. and other first world countries.
So the reason for not signing it is that it probably doesn't represent a net improvement but a net loss.
Because the nature of the problem is global and the economic interactions are similarly global, it doesn't make sense to enforce such a treaty except globally -- either all countries with any real industrial capacity or potential sign it, or none do. Otherwise the source of the pollution will just move around, rather than being quenched, and you won't end up with a net pollution decrease, but a net increase.
Now, all of this makes one big assumption: that it's more expensive per unit of production to produce less pollution. That isn't necessarily true, of course, but any method of production which is more economically efficient and which produces less pollution will be adopted anyway, no treaty required.
...at least that's the initial impression you might get based on the contents of their web site. They might be, though.
If they're strictly a patent litigation firm then the big patent holders have nothing to defend themselves with.
Let's face it: the patent process isn't going to change a bit until the really big patent holders get bitten really hard by it. Patent litigation firms are exactly the type of companies that can sting the big patent holders badly, and a patent like this in the hands of such a firm is a huge weapon.
After the big patent holders get nailed bigtime by other patentholders who cannot, by their nature, be infringing on any patents themselves (and thus aren't subject to the cross-licensing forced compromise that the big patentholders have thuse far relied upon), they'll certainly take steps to force the government to change the patent laws. You can bet those changes will favor the large patentholders, but if we're at all lucky those changes will prove to be beneficial to inventors in general. The current system is so screwed up that the actual inventor of something gains nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Moore's law doesn't apply to unregulated telephone and cable monopolies.
Hmm...I thought the United States had 75% of the world's stoned sheep population. How else do you explain the "we don't need none of them overblown 'rights' thangs, cuz we got our cable TV! I need another drag!" attitude you find so often in the U.S.?
Oh, you meant stone sheep. Nevermind, then.
While this is true, and while I agree with your general sentiment, it doesn't address the core problem here.
And that problem is that by outsourcing anything, whether it's to an entity in the same country or to an entity in a different country, you are intentionally throwing away control over the process in question.
It's important to ask whether or not the process being outsourced is a required part of the business. If it is, then it's probably something that can't be trusted to an outside entity. And if it's not, then perhaps one should consider ditching it entirely.
IT, for instance, is a required part of most businesses these days. While IT itself may not be what the company in question specializes, in, most companies would be insane to outsource their IT operations, because the consequences to the company of their IT processes being implemented poorly can be very high indeed. It's reasonable to get additional help via contractors and such, but only when there's direct oversight of the contractors by employees of the company.
This is why I tend to be against the notion of outsourcing business processes of any kind -- it's a dangerous, foolish thing to do. Any business process that is a reasonable candidate for outsourcing is likely to also be a reasonable candidate for dropping entirely.
Now, how does this relate to the original article? Simple: if the bank in question had kept the call center an in-house operation, they would have had direct control over the security procedures used to maintain customer confidentiality. By outsourcing, they intentionally chose to relinquish control over everything involved in running a call center (which includes how sensitive information is handled) to the company they outsourced their call center operations to. Now their customers are suffering the consequences.
If both galaxies have black holes at their centers, and the simulation is correct, then I have to wonder what the consequences will be for life within either galaxy, as I would imagine the burst of radiation from the collision of the black holes (and the resulting quasar) will be deadly.
Anyone wanna chime in with some numbers?
Maybe the Pierson's Puppeteers have the right idea after all...
$19.84? Man, if this isn't a backhanded reference to our new Norwegian information-control overlords, I don't know what is. :-)
Sue your neighbor for planting unauthorized seed on your property.
If Monsanto can sue you for shit that isn't your fault, then you can sue your neighbor for shit that isn't their fault, and cite the court case you (or one of your neighbors) just lost as precedent. Right?
If enough of that happened, then perhaps people would stop buying Monsanto seed due to the risk of being sued by their neighbors.
Of course, Monsanto's next move might be some sort of indemnification clause in the contract, in which Monsanto covers any legal costs incurred as a result of using their seed...
WTF are you talking about? Of course they do. Who writes most of the legislation that gets voted on? Lawyers (corporate lawyers or lawyers for the special interest groups that bribe the politicians they're targeting, usually). Who votes on the legislation? Lawyers (most legislators are/were lawyers themselves). Who argues the resulting laws in court? Lawyers. Who judges the arguments? Lawyers (most judges are/were lawyers themselves).
Lawyers of one form or another are intimately involved in pretty much every step of every lawmaking process we have.
And these are people who often seem to equate law and ethics (and thus appear to believe that if something is lawful, it must also be ethical. I've heard more than one lawyer actually say as much).
Little wonder the rules we live under are getting more unreasonable and oppressive by the day.
Uh, you do know that almost all judges were/are lawyers, right?
Today, bills are written by (usually corporate) lawyers for lawyers (the state or national congress) to vote into law, which are then argued in court by lawyers in front of a lawyer (judge) who renders judgement on the whole thing. These are people who often (perhaps even usually) appear to believe that there is a one-to-one mapping between ethical and lawful.
And people wonder why lawyers are able to charge hundreds of dollars an hour, and why the laws of the land are getting less reasonable and more oppressive over time...
No, corporations cannot vote directly. What they can, and do, is control the information voters get that determine who they vote for. They can do this because they own the media.
If I could trade that for the ability for corporations to vote directly, I'd do it in a heartbeat, because at least real people outnumber corporations by a wide margin. The ability to control what people see and hear (or don't see and hear -- you can't vote for someone whose existence you don't even know about) about candidates is much, much more valuable than a single vote.
The U.S. as a political system is a lost cause. There's simply no way to get from here (corporations dominating and/or controlling every aspect of lawmaking and voting) to there (a system where the voice of the people is loudest and is listened to and acted upon) short of violent revolution, and violent revolution cannot succeed against a government which controls a modern military. Bottom line: we're screwed, and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it. Better get used to it.
No, what they want is for more people to speed while there are cops around, in order to increase their ticket revenue.
Otherwise, they'd time the traffic lights so that you had to go the slower speed to hit them all green, or they'd increase the speed limit to match the speeds that most people are actually driving.
Yeah, I do too and haven't been roo
What's worse is that quite a few of those very same people use the very same methods that science uses to deal with the world around them in their everyday lives, yet at the same time dispense with the results of science whenever they conflict with their beliefs.
You don't see these people asking "god" to fix their cars when they run out of gas, right? Instead, they go to the gas station and fill the car up with gas themselves, because they've learned through observation and experience that it's what they need to do. That's just an example, and it obviously involves human-made tech, but hopefully it illustrates the point.
It must be convenient for them to be able to pick and choose their beliefs without regard for anything but whether or not they like it...except for when the pesky real world asserts itself in their face.
Okay, you asked for it.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And, I'd wager, the Copyright Term Extension Act.
Not where it matters the most, based on their DMCA record, for one, and probably the CTEA record, too.
You were saying?
ATT was a regulated monopoly, a rather heavily-regulated one at that.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is an unregulated monopoly. Let's face it: in practice, Microsoft does whatever they damned well please. If someone makes trouble for them, then at worst they just pay them off. Works every time. The only thing Microsoft is governed by is the market itself, and it is slowly isolating itself from that influence.
Microsoft doesn't fix their stuff for free because they don't have to. ATT did.
Well, not pure, unregulated capitalism. Regulated capitalism, perhaps.
You see, capitalism by itself encourages corruption and abuse. Consider, for instance, a society that operates under "pure" capitalism, and which has no laws against murder, assault, etc. A corporation which provides an essential good or service (such as food) in that kind of environment would literally eliminate its competition, by assassinating the owners and executives of any competing firms. Eventually that corporation would have no competition because nobody would be stupid enough to risk certain death in order to compete.
The reason things would go down that way is that capitalism encourages unethical behavior. Think about it: unethical behavior is basically behavior which does not follow a certain set of restrictions (e.g., on killing or harming others). Capitalism encourages this because it rewards those who are willing to go further to get what they want. Someone who acts ethically is restricting the set of actions he can take, while someone who acts unethically is not restricted in that way. The person acting unethically has available to him a superset of actions available to the person acting ethically. That means that the person acting unethically has more options than someone acting ethically, and some of those additional options will give him an advantage, and being unethical he will use those. Since the system doesn't have any built-in mechanisms to discourage such unethical behavior, the person who behaves unethically will win, pretty much every time.
Organized crime is what you get with unregulated capitalism.
Like hell it's not! Greed is the desire to get as much as you can regardless of how much you need or even how much is reasonable -- a cornerstone of capitalism. This is obviously a subjective term, in that you have to define "need" and "reasonable", but few people in the world would argue that anyone "needs" millions of dollars a year, and most people would label someone who makes millions a year but who wants even more as "greedy". Whether millions of dollars a year is "reasonable" depends on how it's acquired, and that is very relevant in the case of EA -- the people who are bringing in millions of dollars a year in EA are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone who is forced to work these "crunch time" periods.
What EA is doing isn't just greed, it's evil. Don't believe me? One of the definitions is "Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful". That exactly fits what's happening to the people EA overworks, and EA is doing so intentionally. And the reason? So that their executives can enjoy more of their million-dollar-plus compensation packages. Hmm...intentionally causing harm to others (the coders, in this case) in order to bring benefit to oneself? That's the very essence of evil.
I see. So you believe that the choice between working for a company that treats you like shit and having your whole family starve (due to being unemployed) is a reasonable one to have to make? What, are you one of the managers who works for EA or something? Because you have to be quite heartless to believe that such a choice is a reasonable one to have to make. All I can say is that if you really do believe that then I hope you wind up in that kind of position some day, just to teach you a lesson that you badly need to learn -- that the well-being of people matters, a lot, and to ignore that is to make things worse for everyone. I'd love to hear you try to explain to your wife that it's perfectly okay to be in a position of either working for a shit company where you don't see her and your kids for days or weeks at a time or starving. I'm sure she'll understand, right? If she's smart she'll divorce you for being a dumbass.
Well, so much for your understanding of capitalism, then. EA supplies something the market wants. If EA didn't exist then there would be a vacuum for that supply, and someone else would come in to fill it. In other words, the job would be there even if EA didn't exist. It doesn't automatically follow that this replacement company would treat their employees like slaves, either. They wouldn't have to -- EA chooses to, for whatever reasons (I happen to think that EA's executives are probably like you appear to be: evil, not giving a damn about anyone but themselves and willing to sacrifice everyone else around them to get what they want).
There's a difference between being obligated to hire someone (nobody is) and being obligated to treat them fairly and with respect once you hire them. You're not obligated to do the former, but you are obligated to do the latter. It's worse for almost everyone if you don't do the latter, so society at large has a big interest in making sure you do.
You ultimately have to decide who society should serve. Should it serve the few, wealthiest individuals within it at the expense of the rest, or should it serve everyone within it? Most reasonable people will say the latter. You obviously believe the former. If that's the case, then leave. The rest of us have no use for the likes of you.
Of course, in Real Life you might be quite a nice person and everything. But your words suggest otherwise.
Doing that forces you to compete against the other guy's strengths with your weaknesses.
If you want to put out something that's relevant to readers and which takes advantage of your natural news cycle, then lengthen your cycle and print in-depth analysis and coverage of the news. That way, you're providing something that the online news sources can't (because their cycle is too short) and at the same time giving your readers something they can use.
Why not? Military organizations of other countries have done the same sort of thing (on a smaller scale, of course) since the dawn of man. What makes you think the U.S. military is any different?
How do you think tyrants like Saddam Hussein manage to stay in power? He recruited his military personnel from the civilian ranks the same as we do.
All you have to do to convince a military organization to do something like that is to convince them that it's necessary in order to "win" the war against the revolutionaries. At the point where you'll be inclined to use such force, that's not likely to be hard. It's probably easier, actually, than getting your infantry to fight against the civilians face-to-face, since such a strike would be remote, the casualties a statistic.
It doesn't take much to convince someone that the enemy they're fighting is evil and subhuman. That's done in every conflict in order to make it easier for the troops to fight. The U.S. is no exception to this -- the civil war did happen, you know, and those very same psychological methods were used on both sides to convince the troops to fight. You're a fool if you think the current U.S. military is somehow magically immune to this. Believing that is like believing in Santa Claus.
But even without the truly heavy weapons, we're still talking about a many thousands to one advantage in firepower that the military has over the civilian population on a per-man basis, because the civilian population (right or wrong) doesn't have access to artillery, tanks, air support, satellite surveillance, and all the other things that are necessary for modern warfare, and you need access to those things in order to put up a real fight against an opponent that has those things. To argue otherwise is to argue that a country with a lightly armed civilian population doesn't need a military force in order to successfully defend itself from an outside aggressor (an outside aggressor has much less of an advantage over your civilian population than you do, since you already have a strong military presence within it).
Any government that is determined to stay in power and is facing a civilian uprising will do whatever it takes, including nuking some of its own cities. But it won't do that unless it feels it must. The U.S. government already has many layers of protection from violent revolution in place, mainly the various forms of "law enforcement", so involving the military would be a last-ditch effort on the government's part.
And we haven't even started talking about the difficulty the revolution (a very large-scale operation) would have in keeping its communications secret from the very government it's trying to overthrow.
What makes the advantage for the soldier so much greater isn't his personal weaponry, but the support weaponry he has available to him: air support, artillery, etc. How much of an advantage the soldier has depends on which weapons you wish to consider. It's millions to one if you account for the truly big stuff, like nuclear and biological weapons.
It's even worse than that: the media corporations own -- surprise -- the media! That means that they control most of what voters see and learn about candidates, and that means that all candidates have to please the media corporations, otherwise they'll quickly find themselves the victim of the "Dean Scream" treatment. And since the media corporations almost certainly sell (in whatever form) their influence over candidates to other corporations, the end result is that almost no candidate in office will act against the wishes of the corporations. And big corporations like restrictive "IP" laws (because it gives them additional power over those with less money), so you'll find very few viable candidates that are in favor of less restrictive "IP" laws (unless they're less restrictive only for the big corporations).
This situation has no resolution short of violent revolution, and that can't succeed with the firepower advantage (thousands to millions to one, depending on which weapons you want to count, on a per-soldier versus per-civilian basis) the military has over the civilian population.
Better get used to more and more draconian "IP" laws (and other laws, for that matter).
Yeah, well, impenetrable tax laws also create jobs for those who write software to do taxes and who provide tax services, but you'd be a fool to argue that the existence of those jobs is itself a good thing economically.
The additional labor expended to meet stricter emission controls is an economic inefficiency, no two ways about it. Whether it's a necessary one is an entirely different question, and whether or not the emission controls themselves represent a net economic benefit is again a different question (offsetting the increase in labor required to meet the emission requirements are a reduction in health care costs and a general increase in well-being, both of which are economic wins).
Please, people, don't just equate the creation of jobs with economic benefit. The overall picture is quite a lot more complex than that.
An entirely new industry which does not, itself, improve overall productivity or supply a naturally occurring demand (a demand which does not require the force of law to create) is not an economic improvement -- it's an economic drain. Otherwise you'd have to argue that the "industry" which has been created by the impenetrable tax law in the U.S. also represents an economic improvement, when it clearly does not -- such industries consume manpower that almost certainly could be better (in economic terms) spent elsewhere.
The only way this new industry you speak of can represent a net improvement for the economy is if it somehow manages to create production processes which are inherently more economically efficient (that is, require fewer total man-hours to yield the same production) than those already in place, and enough so that it more than offsets the cost this new industry represents. Incentives to find such processes already exist in most industrial areas of the world where large monopolistic corporations don't have primary control.
If you wish to argue that such an industry is a survival necessity than by all means do so. But don't attribute to it economic advantages that it doesn't have.
Of course, all this assumes that those countries which are subject to third-world limits in the treaty don't suddenly get subjected to first-world limits prior to taking on the industrial production burden described in the above message. It also depends on whether or not the first-world countries are already under the third-world limits, since if they're not then a first-world country signing the treaty will probably yield a net win even if the economic activity goes to a third-world country that has also signed it.
So whether or not it really ends up being a net win versus a net loss depends greatly on how the rules get applied and, of course, whether or not the signatories play by the rules of the treaty. It also depends on how the third-world countries are developing. If they skip coal and oil-powered plants and go directly for nuclear, then clearly their emissions per economic output unit will likely be much less than that of the U.S. despite their third-world status.
No, it's not a start. I wish it were. Think it through. If the treaty puts first-world countries, which pollute less by any reasonable measure than developing countries, at even more of an economic disadvantage than they already are with respect to manufacturing and other high-energy-usage industries, then what exactly do you think is going to happen? Right: pollution in the first world goes down, but pollution in the third world goes up by at least as much, because even more (environmentally unrestricted) economic production will happen in China and the other countries which aren't restricted in the same way than would happen without the treaty. Hence, at least as much global pollution for the amount of economic output as we already have, if not more. In other words, at best no net win for the world, and quite possibly a net loss for the world, but a definite economic loss for the U.S. and other first world countries.
So the reason for not signing it is that it probably doesn't represent a net improvement but a net loss.
Because the nature of the problem is global and the economic interactions are similarly global, it doesn't make sense to enforce such a treaty except globally -- either all countries with any real industrial capacity or potential sign it, or none do. Otherwise the source of the pollution will just move around, rather than being quenched, and you won't end up with a net pollution decrease, but a net increase.
Now, all of this makes one big assumption: that it's more expensive per unit of production to produce less pollution. That isn't necessarily true, of course, but any method of production which is more economically efficient and which produces less pollution will be adopted anyway, no treaty required.
If they're strictly a patent litigation firm then the big patent holders have nothing to defend themselves with.
Let's face it: the patent process isn't going to change a bit until the really big patent holders get bitten really hard by it. Patent litigation firms are exactly the type of companies that can sting the big patent holders badly, and a patent like this in the hands of such a firm is a huge weapon.
After the big patent holders get nailed bigtime by other patentholders who cannot, by their nature, be infringing on any patents themselves (and thus aren't subject to the cross-licensing forced compromise that the big patentholders have thuse far relied upon), they'll certainly take steps to force the government to change the patent laws. You can bet those changes will favor the large patentholders, but if we're at all lucky those changes will prove to be beneficial to inventors in general. The current system is so screwed up that the actual inventor of something gains nothing.