But you can vote the palms those dollars grease out of office.
Uh, just who do you think decides who's going to be on the ballot? You? Nope, guess again.
With very few exceptions, the only politicians that ever manage to make it onto the ballot these days are the ones that are willing to suck up to the corporations that own the media. The reason is simple: you can't win an election if the media isn't willing to give you favorable exposure. How the media spins things can make or break a politician. Don't believe me? Then look at what happened to Dean.
Since you can only vote for the people that manage to make it onto the ballot, and the only people who have any real chance of winning are those that are essentially selected by the media corporations, I think it's safe to say that there is no chance that the government will ever do anything that the media corporations don't like. So copyright terms will be extended ad infinitum, and the government will sign the "Broadcast Flag" treaty, and there isn't anything at all you can do about it.
Welcome to the corporate-owned world. Enjoy your stay.
History tells us that all oppressive governments end abruptly when the populace has had so much oppression that the average person (merchant, farmer, policeman, soldier (even *commanders*)) has had enough, cannot live one more day under the regime, and eventually the pressure is too great, the whole system breaks, you have revolution followed by whatever fills the vacuum left after the revolution.
Yes. But never before in history has a government had so much of a firepower advantage over its civilian population than now. As long as the government is willing to use that firepower against its own civilians, the civilians don't stand a chance even if they revolt. Such a government would have no problem killing off a large percentage of the population it governs as long as that's what it takes to remain in power.
The peashooters that the civilian population is "allowed" to have, and even the heavier arms that some (very few) civilians have despite laws to the contrary, are no match for the guns, bombs, artillery, aircraft, armor, etc., that the U.S. military possesses.
And no, Iraq is not a counterexample -- because the U.S. is very definitely still there as an occupying force despite the Iraqis' opposition.
remember: your boss bargains in good faith with his supplier because if he didn't they wouldn't do business with him. your boss bargains in good faith with his distributers because if he didn't they wouldn't do business with him either.
why does your boss think his labour is exempt from this common sense?
Because he has a lot more power over his labor than over his suppliers and distributors. This is especially true in an economy where jobs are scarce, like the current U.S. one.
Economic transactions are affected as much by the relative power of the actors as they are by the supply and demand situation. Corporations today have much more power than even a large group of individuals, since the corporations can affect the individuals either through the legal system (they can afford many more lawyers than individuals can) or through the government directly (I think it's accurate to say that corporations control most of what goes on in the U.S. government today, at least for those things that affect U.S. residents). Any economic model which doesn't account for power disparity is one that simply isn't going to be accurate.
A wealthy American company can - and most likely will, if they plan to be around for some time - reinvest in something called R&D, expansion, growth - all depens on what business you're in.
Yes. And which country, exactly, do you think will get all the new R&D action? Which one will get the expansion and growth? It won't be the U.S. Why?
Because the people who are in favor of offshoring aren't asking the right question. They're assuming that the types of jobs being offshored right now are the only ones that will be offshored.
No, the right question to ask is: which types of jobs can't be offshored? And the answer should be obvious: any job that doesn't require a physical presence in the country in question. And the number of those types of jobs decreases over time as technology improves. You think the fact that offshoring is happening now is a coincidence? It's not -- it's thanks to information technologies like the internet that offshoring of "knowledge work" is now sufficiently feasible that it looks enticing to corporations.
So no, the R&D jobs won't be made available here in the U.S., they'll be offshored because they can be offshored (what, you think the U.S. has a monopoly on PhD's and other bright and creative people or something?). And because the work isn't being done in the U.S., the expansion won't happen in the U.S., either. What's the point of expanding your business in a country when you're not going to be hiring any additional people there anyway?
Even sales jobs in the U.S. will see a decline. This will happpen because the number of people in the U.S. who can afford the goods the company in question is selling will decline, because they'll be unemployed. Unemployed people don't buy much beyond what's necessary to survive -- they can't, because they don't have the money. They don't have the money because they don't have a job.
But we're not done yet. When the customer base in the U.S. declines, what do you think these corporations will do? Why, the first thing they always do when faced with declining income: cut their labor force. First in the U.S. and then, when that doesn't work (it'll just make the problem worse, though it'll take a bit of time), overseas. And when the job market overseas goes to shit like it's doing here in the U.S., what do you have? A global depression, that's what.
Again, why is "outside of the country" the critical variable?
Why not "outside of your town", or "outside of your circle of aqcuaintances"? Or, indeed, given the terms of your post, "outside of your extended family"?
Because your freedom to move is severely curtailed once you start talking about moving outside of the country.
Furthermore, the standard of living changes dramatically once you leave the country, as do laws governing labor, businesses, environment, etc.
Once you look outside the country you're no longer on equal footing.
Btw, if you have been following my posts on
my blog and on the desktop-devel-list, you will
know that my feeling is that all of the existing
toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will
become obsolete and we need to start looking
at the next generation toolkit system.
If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.
You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:
Speed over the network. Instead of having to transmit low-level graphics primitives, you now only have to transmit higher-level widget information. This should represent an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of network traffic required. It also means the bandwidth between the code that draws the widget and the code that renders it will likely be as high as possible (a local socket or some such).
Consistency. With a client/server widget architecture, all applications running anywhere will have the same look and feel when they're displaying through your widget server. Additionally, changing the theme in use will change the look and feel of all the applications using the widget server (which, ideally, should be all of them).
Abstraction. Because the widgets are implemented on top of a protocol, widget libraries simply have to all talk the same protocol. This means that it doesn't matter what the widget library itself looks like, what language it's implemented in, what object paradigm it uses, or anything else: the look and feel will still be the same. This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.
Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.
It is also predicted that, by the year 2087, almost all of these people will have died.
I hope you're being sarcastic (and suspect you are). Hard to tell just by looking. But if you're not trying to be sarcastic, then you're either an idiot or a politician. And the only reason I'm not simply assuming that you're being sarcastic is that people have actually made similar claims in an attempt to make the consequences of the Chernobyl accident seem worse than they actually are.
2087 is about 100 years after the Chernobyl accident, so of course almost all of the people in the Chernobyl area at the time of the accident will be dead by then. Of course, the same is also true of everyone else on the planet who was around at the time of the accident.
People who make some claim that "many or most of the people who were in the vicinity of Chernobyl at the time of the accident will be dead N years after the time of the accident", where N is 50 or so years, are attempting to deceive the reader into believing that there's a strong link between the accident and the deaths 50 or so years after the accident, when most of the deaths in question will occur anyway due to other factors.
What stops them is that MS has full access to the SAMBA source code under the Open Source license just like the rest of us. If there was any hint of the MS leaked code in SAMBA, nothing would give MS greater pleasure than to come down hard on the SAMBA team.
Microsoft doesn't have to be correct in their accusation in order to bankrupt the Samba guys -- they can willfully make false accusations in court against the Samba guys and bankrupt them. Certainly the Samba guys will be ordered to stop development while the trial is taking place, something which would take years. And with the way the U.S. judicial system works, the Samba guys would have to spend more money (after they're broke) on a countersuit in order to recover damages.
Microsoft has so much money that they don't have to care what the judicial branch says. They've proven this countless times already. Why can't you people understand this?
Allegedly denting the profits of American corporate profits is not the same as killing people.
You're right about that. Denting the profits of American corporate profits is clearly worse than killing people, since American foreign policy basically amounts to either encouraging people elsewhere to kill in order to maintain American corporate profits or sending the U.S. military in to do the same.
What companies DO NOT exist for is to provide jobs for Americans, Indians or anyone else.
If American corporations don't exist in order to provide jobs for Americans and to benefit the American economy, then those corporations should not reap the benefits of American laws (and, by inference, American law enforcement), American infrastructure, the American military, etc.
You people who believe that businesses should be able to run in a vacuum are forgetting one very important thing: corporations exist to serve society, NOT VICE VERSA. This is why corporations are given charters by the government. It used to be that these corporations would have their charters yanked if they were shown to harm society, but that sadly has not been the case for a very long time.
Until people such as yourself figure out that the individual is a first class citizen and the corporation should not be, we will continue to see greater and greater abuses of the people by corporations.
If give a friend $100k to "take care of somebody for me", and they give a friend $80k to "take care of this problem", and then my problem disappears from the face of the earth, the police can come after me. If I set up 12 layers of shell companies and went through them, I'm still on the hook. RICO laws and all that - the gangsters were trying to avoid getting caught with this kind of stuff since the start of the last century. The laws are there.
Yeah, and we've seen how well the other laws (Sherman anti-trust act) have worked against Microsoft, haven't we?
Although this is slightly irrelevent, my grandmother was given bad medication from a doctor that conflicted with her other medication. She was in the hostipal for quite awhile and is still recovering. We didn't sue because apparently we wouldn't get anything out of it, because she's on Medicaid or medicare or whatever. I don't know what action my mom is taking, or if he's right about the lawsuit deal, but eh.
Your health insurance premiums will either pay for the medical damage caused by bad doctors or will pay for that and malpractice lawsuits. But either way, your premium will reflect the increased cost of medical care due to negligent doctors.
So, that being the case, I know which way I'd rather see it go: I'd rather skip the malpractice suits. Why? A couple of reasons:
Doctors are human just like everyone else and they make mistakes from time to time. It's going to happen whether you like it or not, no matter how many malpractice lawsuits occur. So the possibility of a screwup is something that everyone should account for when evaluating medical care. Since malpractice suits happen after the fact, they don't do that much to prevent medical mistakes from happening. And that means they're little more than a very expensive tax on the system.
The standards of evidence in malpractice suits are, simply, the "preponderance of evidence". The problem here is that this standard of evidence is lax enough to allow judgements against the defending doctor even if the mistake in question was a legitimate one. If this were not the case, malpractice insurance would be a lot lower than it is because the probability of a judgement against the doctor would be much less than it is -- the vast majority of doctors want their patients to be healthy and certainly don't want to do anyone any harm.
A more balanced and fair system would allow for the possibility of screwups and would end up hitting only those doctors that really are incompetent or malevolent. There's a relatively simple way to do that: a combination of regulatory oversight (you're examined by the regulatory body whenever you screw up too many times and you get your license yanked if the regulatory body decides your screwups warrant it) and criminal prosecution (if you intentionally caused harm by your malpractice). The system is fair because the harshest penalties require the greatest amount of evidence, while it accounts for the fact that people do make mistakes from time to time.
If we have to modify the current system, the way to do that is to limit the malpractice damage to the actual damages caused by the doctor in question, meaning that he has to pay all medical costs incurred by the victim as a result of his screwup. Without this limitation, malpractice lawsuits are a form of lottery, which is the situation we have right now and the reason that malpractice insurance is so high.
To bring it back on topic, I question the original assertion that MS has somehow has bought the overturning of the browser patent because there is no MO (MS haven't successfully overturned a patent before and there's certainly no evidence that they've ever payed off the Patent Office).
No MO? Are you kidding? This is the first time I know of that Microsoft was staring at a half a billion dollar patent judgement against them. How is that not an MO for doing whatever they can to get the patent invalidated??
David Boise and company get 20 percent off of the top of all SCO IP Licences sold. When this is all over just watch these fucking rats pointing the finger at one another.
Perhaps. But win or lose, Boise and company are going to get a shitload of business after this, because they'll have demonstrated that they're willing to sue anyone for anything on behalf of anyone who is willing to pay. I dare say that in today's "business" climate, that could be worth a lot -- companies that hired them would be more likely to get an extortion payment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsettlement from their victim^H^H^H^H^H^Htarget than if they had hired another firm, because this one has proven itself willing to go to court no matter how bad the plaintiff's case.
Actually, unlike airplanes, cars aren't built to rely on a "stressed skin" for structural support. Cars nowadays are built on a "unibody" design and all the cosmetic parts-- fenders, doors, hood, trunk lid-- are hung on the outside.
Uh, no.
Unibody is a "stressed skin" manufacturing technique. The name sort of implies that, actually: "one body". The technique used to build cars prior to the unibody concept involved building a frame that would take all the load and attaching all the panels onto the frame. It made for a heavier car, but the car was sturdier as well.
The newer Ford Mustang (1980s and later) is a good example of an automobile made using unibody techniques. It has two "subframes", front and rear, that provide structure that the body panels themselves cannot, and the only thing connecting the two are the body panels between. The body panels (at least for mid 80's to early 90's models) weren't the best at this duty, and the end result was a significant amount of torsional movement of one subframe relative to the other over uneven surfaces: you could lift one corner of the car and the other three points would remain on the ground as the body twisted. This disconnect between the front and rear would eventually cause some of the body skin to wrinkle a bit (mainly in the area surrounding the hatchback attach points). Performance enthusiasts like myself routinely added subframe connectors to these cars, which would structurally connect the front and rear subframes together, making them a single frame that is much stronger than the original structure. I can lift the corner of my car and the body will stay rigid, thus causing one of the other corners to lift as well.
Most unibody cars aren't quite that bad in the structural strength department, but make no mistake: the body panels are structural on a unibody car.
"Working the ICANN process is like being nibbled to death by ducks," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president for government relations. "It takes forever, it doesn't make sense, and in the end we're still dead in the water."
Funny, that sounds a lot like the process of getting Network Solutions (a.k.a. Verisign) to make domain changes -- or, at least, a lot like the way it used to be. I ditched them a few years ago for precisely this reason.
Sure you can choose. In MN your chance in March 2nd, also called super tuesday where people in 10 different states all at once get a chance go choose who goes on the ballot.
And in the primaries you get to choose from...
... wait for it...
a list of people that have already been selected for you!
It doesn't matter that there's a level of indirection here, the bottom line is that Those in Power are the people who ultimately choose who you will see on the ballot. The democrats and republicans both know that their party will lose for sure unless they put at least one person on the primary ballot that is willing to do the bidding of Those in Power, because they know who controls the mass media.
And thus John Kerry, or someone very much like him, will win the Democratic primary -- the media isn't going to favor anyone who won't play ball with Those in Power (what do you expect, when Those in Power own the media?). Once it becomes clear that a particular person who actually stands a chance of winning won't play ball that way, that person will all but disappear from media coverage. That seems to have happened to Dean.
And as a result, the two candidates who are most likely to win will both be corporate shills, just as they have been for the past 20 years or so. At that point, Those in Power don't care who wins as long as it's one of those two (the republican or the democrat): they get what they want either way.
We tell them no, then they break it in to a bunch of pieces and do it anyway.
Why do we keep electing these people who keep misrepresenting us to represent us?
Because you can only elect from those people on the list that is essentially chosen for you. And you don't get much of a say in who goes on that list.
Those with Power (those who own and/or control this country's largest corporations) choose who get on that list and "sell" it to you via their mass media outlets.
And the end result is that the only people you can realistically choose from are people who will not represent you, but who will represent Those with Power. It's why the "democracy" part of the "democratic republic" title for the U.S. is a lie.
the only way this is going to change is if there is a violent overthrow of the government, since the corporate/statist forces would not allow change from within the system
And a violent overthrow of the government isn't possible without the backing of the military, since the average military soldier has (when everything is accounted for, like artillery, air, and advanced weaponry) anywhere between a thousands to one and a millions to one advantage over the average civilian.
Now do you people finally understand why I think a worldwide police state is inevitable at this point??
Hardly. Need I mention Eolas? You people seriously need to get over this whole 'The corporations rule the world' crap.
I wouldn't be so smug in dismissing the danger of corporations yet by invoking Eolas as a counterexample, since it is highly unlikely that Eolas' patent will be allowed to stand after it is reexamined -- something which almost certainly would not have happened were one of those corporations not involved.
After all, if you don't stand up for yourself nobody else will.
But most companies (and bosses) don't want to hire someone who will stand up for themselves -- they want to hire someone who will do as he's told no matter what.
In a true democracy every person has a vote on every aspect of the way the government is run. In a representative republic you get to elect representatives who make the decisions for you.
Yes, that's true, but it only works when the representative you elect represents you. That's not the case in the U.S.: the representatives don't represent their constituents, they represent the corporations that made their election possible (can't be elected unless you're in favor with the corporations that own the media, at the very least, as Howard Dean has proven -- that means that you can't be elected unless you're willing to be a corporate pawn).
And this is largely due to the fact that while the people do elect their representatives, they can only elect them from a list largely supplied to them by others. They don't, themselves, really have much input into who is on the ballot, at least in the two major parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, just who do you think decides who's going to be on the ballot? You? Nope, guess again.
With very few exceptions, the only politicians that ever manage to make it onto the ballot these days are the ones that are willing to suck up to the corporations that own the media. The reason is simple: you can't win an election if the media isn't willing to give you favorable exposure. How the media spins things can make or break a politician. Don't believe me? Then look at what happened to Dean.
Since you can only vote for the people that manage to make it onto the ballot, and the only people who have any real chance of winning are those that are essentially selected by the media corporations, I think it's safe to say that there is no chance that the government will ever do anything that the media corporations don't like. So copyright terms will be extended ad infinitum, and the government will sign the "Broadcast Flag" treaty, and there isn't anything at all you can do about it.
Welcome to the corporate-owned world. Enjoy your stay.
Yes. But never before in history has a government had so much of a firepower advantage over its civilian population than now. As long as the government is willing to use that firepower against its own civilians, the civilians don't stand a chance even if they revolt. Such a government would have no problem killing off a large percentage of the population it governs as long as that's what it takes to remain in power.
The peashooters that the civilian population is "allowed" to have, and even the heavier arms that some (very few) civilians have despite laws to the contrary, are no match for the guns, bombs, artillery, aircraft, armor, etc., that the U.S. military possesses.
And no, Iraq is not a counterexample -- because the U.S. is very definitely still there as an occupying force despite the Iraqis' opposition.
Because he has a lot more power over his labor than over his suppliers and distributors. This is especially true in an economy where jobs are scarce, like the current U.S. one.
Economic transactions are affected as much by the relative power of the actors as they are by the supply and demand situation. Corporations today have much more power than even a large group of individuals, since the corporations can affect the individuals either through the legal system (they can afford many more lawyers than individuals can) or through the government directly (I think it's accurate to say that corporations control most of what goes on in the U.S. government today, at least for those things that affect U.S. residents). Any economic model which doesn't account for power disparity is one that simply isn't going to be accurate.
Yes. And which country, exactly, do you think will get all the new R&D action? Which one will get the expansion and growth? It won't be the U.S. Why?
Because the people who are in favor of offshoring aren't asking the right question. They're assuming that the types of jobs being offshored right now are the only ones that will be offshored.
No, the right question to ask is: which types of jobs can't be offshored? And the answer should be obvious: any job that doesn't require a physical presence in the country in question. And the number of those types of jobs decreases over time as technology improves. You think the fact that offshoring is happening now is a coincidence? It's not -- it's thanks to information technologies like the internet that offshoring of "knowledge work" is now sufficiently feasible that it looks enticing to corporations.
So no, the R&D jobs won't be made available here in the U.S., they'll be offshored because they can be offshored (what, you think the U.S. has a monopoly on PhD's and other bright and creative people or something?). And because the work isn't being done in the U.S., the expansion won't happen in the U.S., either. What's the point of expanding your business in a country when you're not going to be hiring any additional people there anyway?
Even sales jobs in the U.S. will see a decline. This will happpen because the number of people in the U.S. who can afford the goods the company in question is selling will decline, because they'll be unemployed. Unemployed people don't buy much beyond what's necessary to survive -- they can't, because they don't have the money. They don't have the money because they don't have a job.
But we're not done yet. When the customer base in the U.S. declines, what do you think these corporations will do? Why, the first thing they always do when faced with declining income: cut their labor force. First in the U.S. and then, when that doesn't work (it'll just make the problem worse, though it'll take a bit of time), overseas. And when the job market overseas goes to shit like it's doing here in the U.S., what do you have? A global depression, that's what.
Because your freedom to move is severely curtailed once you start talking about moving outside of the country.
Furthermore, the standard of living changes dramatically once you leave the country, as do laws governing labor, businesses, environment, etc.
Once you look outside the country you're no longer on equal footing.
If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.
You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:
Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.
I hope you're being sarcastic (and suspect you are). Hard to tell just by looking. But if you're not trying to be sarcastic, then you're either an idiot or a politician. And the only reason I'm not simply assuming that you're being sarcastic is that people have actually made similar claims in an attempt to make the consequences of the Chernobyl accident seem worse than they actually are.
2087 is about 100 years after the Chernobyl accident, so of course almost all of the people in the Chernobyl area at the time of the accident will be dead by then. Of course, the same is also true of everyone else on the planet who was around at the time of the accident.
People who make some claim that "many or most of the people who were in the vicinity of Chernobyl at the time of the accident will be dead N years after the time of the accident", where N is 50 or so years, are attempting to deceive the reader into believing that there's a strong link between the accident and the deaths 50 or so years after the accident, when most of the deaths in question will occur anyway due to other factors.
Microsoft doesn't have to be correct in their accusation in order to bankrupt the Samba guys -- they can willfully make false accusations in court against the Samba guys and bankrupt them. Certainly the Samba guys will be ordered to stop development while the trial is taking place, something which would take years. And with the way the U.S. judicial system works, the Samba guys would have to spend more money (after they're broke) on a countersuit in order to recover damages.
Microsoft has so much money that they don't have to care what the judicial branch says. They've proven this countless times already. Why can't you people understand this?
You might not want to bet money on it. Why?
One word: Diebold.
You're right about that. Denting the profits of American corporate profits is clearly worse than killing people, since American foreign policy basically amounts to either encouraging people elsewhere to kill in order to maintain American corporate profits or sending the U.S. military in to do the same.
If American corporations don't exist in order to provide jobs for Americans and to benefit the American economy, then those corporations should not reap the benefits of American laws (and, by inference, American law enforcement), American infrastructure, the American military, etc.
You people who believe that businesses should be able to run in a vacuum are forgetting one very important thing: corporations exist to serve society, NOT VICE VERSA. This is why corporations are given charters by the government. It used to be that these corporations would have their charters yanked if they were shown to harm society, but that sadly has not been the case for a very long time.
Until people such as yourself figure out that the individual is a first class citizen and the corporation should not be, we will continue to see greater and greater abuses of the people by corporations.
Yeah, and we've seen how well the other laws (Sherman anti-trust act) have worked against Microsoft, haven't we?
Looks to me like there's no escaping the soul-crushing, draconian corporate police state that's almost (if not already) here in everything but name.
Isn't there any country out there with the balls to refuse to give in to shit like this that isn't already a police state of some kind??
Your health insurance premiums will either pay for the medical damage caused by bad doctors or will pay for that and malpractice lawsuits. But either way, your premium will reflect the increased cost of medical care due to negligent doctors.
So, that being the case, I know which way I'd rather see it go: I'd rather skip the malpractice suits. Why? A couple of reasons:
A more balanced and fair system would allow for the possibility of screwups and would end up hitting only those doctors that really are incompetent or malevolent. There's a relatively simple way to do that: a combination of regulatory oversight (you're examined by the regulatory body whenever you screw up too many times and you get your license yanked if the regulatory body decides your screwups warrant it) and criminal prosecution (if you intentionally caused harm by your malpractice). The system is fair because the harshest penalties require the greatest amount of evidence, while it accounts for the fact that people do make mistakes from time to time.
If we have to modify the current system, the way to do that is to limit the malpractice damage to the actual damages caused by the doctor in question, meaning that he has to pay all medical costs incurred by the victim as a result of his screwup. Without this limitation, malpractice lawsuits are a form of lottery, which is the situation we have right now and the reason that malpractice insurance is so high.
No MO? Are you kidding? This is the first time I know of that Microsoft was staring at a half a billion dollar patent judgement against them. How is that not an MO for doing whatever they can to get the patent invalidated??
Perhaps. But win or lose, Boise and company are going to get a shitload of business after this, because they'll have demonstrated that they're willing to sue anyone for anything on behalf of anyone who is willing to pay. I dare say that in today's "business" climate, that could be worth a lot -- companies that hired them would be more likely to get an extortion payment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsettlement from their victim^H^H^H^H^H^Htarget than if they had hired another firm, because this one has proven itself willing to go to court no matter how bad the plaintiff's case.
Uh, no.
Unibody is a "stressed skin" manufacturing technique. The name sort of implies that, actually: "one body". The technique used to build cars prior to the unibody concept involved building a frame that would take all the load and attaching all the panels onto the frame. It made for a heavier car, but the car was sturdier as well.
The newer Ford Mustang (1980s and later) is a good example of an automobile made using unibody techniques. It has two "subframes", front and rear, that provide structure that the body panels themselves cannot, and the only thing connecting the two are the body panels between. The body panels (at least for mid 80's to early 90's models) weren't the best at this duty, and the end result was a significant amount of torsional movement of one subframe relative to the other over uneven surfaces: you could lift one corner of the car and the other three points would remain on the ground as the body twisted. This disconnect between the front and rear would eventually cause some of the body skin to wrinkle a bit (mainly in the area surrounding the hatchback attach points). Performance enthusiasts like myself routinely added subframe connectors to these cars, which would structurally connect the front and rear subframes together, making them a single frame that is much stronger than the original structure. I can lift the corner of my car and the body will stay rigid, thus causing one of the other corners to lift as well.
Most unibody cars aren't quite that bad in the structural strength department, but make no mistake: the body panels are structural on a unibody car.
Such a shame...testing on a mannequin just isn't the same, but I guess you just make do with what you have.
Funny, that sounds a lot like the process of getting Network Solutions (a.k.a. Verisign) to make domain changes -- or, at least, a lot like the way it used to be. I ditched them a few years ago for precisely this reason.
To Verisign: look in the mirror, pal.
And in the primaries you get to choose from ...
a list of people that have already been selected for you!
It doesn't matter that there's a level of indirection here, the bottom line is that Those in Power are the people who ultimately choose who you will see on the ballot. The democrats and republicans both know that their party will lose for sure unless they put at least one person on the primary ballot that is willing to do the bidding of Those in Power, because they know who controls the mass media.
And thus John Kerry, or someone very much like him, will win the Democratic primary -- the media isn't going to favor anyone who won't play ball with Those in Power (what do you expect, when Those in Power own the media?). Once it becomes clear that a particular person who actually stands a chance of winning won't play ball that way, that person will all but disappear from media coverage. That seems to have happened to Dean.
And as a result, the two candidates who are most likely to win will both be corporate shills, just as they have been for the past 20 years or so. At that point, Those in Power don't care who wins as long as it's one of those two (the republican or the democrat): they get what they want either way.
Because you can only elect from those people on the list that is essentially chosen for you. And you don't get much of a say in who goes on that list.
Those with Power (those who own and/or control this country's largest corporations) choose who get on that list and "sell" it to you via their mass media outlets.
And the end result is that the only people you can realistically choose from are people who will not represent you, but who will represent Those with Power. It's why the "democracy" part of the "democratic republic" title for the U.S. is a lie.
And a violent overthrow of the government isn't possible without the backing of the military, since the average military soldier has (when everything is accounted for, like artillery, air, and advanced weaponry) anywhere between a thousands to one and a millions to one advantage over the average civilian.
Now do you people finally understand why I think a worldwide police state is inevitable at this point??
I wouldn't be so smug in dismissing the danger of corporations yet by invoking Eolas as a counterexample, since it is highly unlikely that Eolas' patent will be allowed to stand after it is reexamined -- something which almost certainly would not have happened were one of those corporations not involved.
But most companies (and bosses) don't want to hire someone who will stand up for themselves -- they want to hire someone who will do as he's told no matter what.
Yes, that's true, but it only works when the representative you elect represents you. That's not the case in the U.S.: the representatives don't represent their constituents, they represent the corporations that made their election possible (can't be elected unless you're in favor with the corporations that own the media, at the very least, as Howard Dean has proven -- that means that you can't be elected unless you're willing to be a corporate pawn).
And this is largely due to the fact that while the people do elect their representatives, they can only elect them from a list largely supplied to them by others. They don't, themselves, really have much input into who is on the ballot, at least in the two major parties.