Re:Wouldn't a Web portal be a better idea?
on
TheOpenCD 1.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, it would for people who are already interested enough to follow through with the effort it would take. The cool thing about the CD is that it's portable, easy and cheap to reproduce, and most important: it's very convenient.
I'm using Linux for most of my computing because somebody handed me a throw-away Knoppix CD. If he had told me, "Hey, there's this cool Knoppix thing that lets you try Linux with no hassles. You can download all 658 Megs for free!" I'd probably still be using Win98 exclusively.
The Dalai LLama ...LLam's LLaw: If x is the amount of bullshit someone has to wade through to try something new and y represents the likelihood that they will actually do so, then the value of x is inversely proportional to the value of y....
I don't know if this is off-topic or if someone has mentioned something similar; I doubt anyone will even see this post at this point in the discussion, but I'm going to tell the story, anyway. This story relates one simple thing anybody doing activities with kids can do to encourage at least one kid to appreciate the value of math and science; with enough people doing it, maybe we can stem another article like this 20 years from now. Bear with me, I know how much the story sounds like a geeked-out after school special.
When I was a kid at summer camp they broke us down into teams for a day-long competition. Each event was designed to promote the usual values: faster, bigger, stronger, more aggressive. At the end of the day, our team was tied for first with one other team as we headed into the final event.
All the campers were standing in a grassy area next to the lake, surrounding the lifeguard tower. The guy on the tower asked each team to pick out their smartest member. Obviously, I got picked (mostly, I think, since I was the nerdiest looking ).
We stood in the center of a crowd of two hundred or so sweaty junior-high faces, all intently focused on us. The counselor would read a series of numbers and operations; our job was to follow the series in our heads. After the last number, the first contestant to give the closest answer to the actual value won the competetion.
In dead silence, the counselor started the competition. "30...plus 12...minus 17...times 2...plus 4...etc." It felt like my head would explode, but I followed as best I could, until the counselor said, "Done."
The silence was painful. I waited for a moment, typically unsure of myself, then said (in a meek, supremely wussy voice), "35." The counselor asked if the other contestants had their guesses. After one of the most excruciating 5-second periods of my life, they gave answers that were nowhere near mine (sending me into a panic).
The sadistic counselor waited a bit, then turned to me and said, "I'm sorry, your answer is....ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!"
The crowd went wild; not just my team, everybody. For the next day or two, I was a hero. An absolute fucking hero. Hot chicks congratulated me (they didn't offer to date me, but I took what I could get).
I'd like to say that it steered me into a career as a mathematician, but it didn't. I wish the feat itself had been more impressive (I'm sure most/.ers can solve 4th-order systems in their heads). It wasn't a big deal, but it did give me the idea that math is a beautiful thing in and of itself, and it did something else that was more important.
It showed every kid at that camp that being smart was valuable and that being smart had a place alongside being strong, fast, and aggressive.
Again, I know that's a cheesy little story that doesn't do much but make me look pathetic, but maybe the activity can help someone looking to inspire a kid or two.
The Dalai LLama ...I was cool for an afternoon once, I promise...
3 REM ITS BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE I DID THAT TO A VIC-20
4 REM AND THEY STILL DONT LET ME IN THAT MALL
It's been a while since we had that T.I. 99-4A, let's see if I remember this right...
10 LET X=100,000,000
20 PRINT X
30 LET X=(X-1)
40 NEXT X
50 IF X=0, THEN GOTO 80
60 GOTO 20
70 BEEP
80 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST"
90 GOTO 70
100 END
That may not be exactly right, but you should get the gist. I also had some kind of delay mechanism to keep the computer from counting down too fast; I could get two or three going at once before the first one went off, but it's been too long and those lines represent the sum total of my programming knowledge.
The Dalai LLama ...hit ENTER and scramble to watch from outside the store....hell, yeah, I'm a l337 h4X0r...
I'm not technically adept enough to argue the qualities of the app itself, but I think it's interesting to note that a couple of posters have mentioned that KCEasy folded easily.
"I feel that inclusion of FastTrack access with KCeasy is not worth a legal battle between Sharman and myself"
The above is what concerns me. I don't know jack about German law, but I think it's sad that we are again seeing that the mere threat of possible legal action is an effective deterrent.
Today's Davids will never even get a shot at their Goliaths if they can't even afford the price of admission to the arena.
The Dalai Llama ...yeah, I know they fought in an open field...whatever...
"Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"
What a great euphemism.
The Dalai LLama ...sure, I'll cooperate...just do me a favor and disconnect these electrified alligator clamps from my nipples...right, right...you're the dictator, whatever you say, just put down the hacksaw...
The place is huge, and is covered with trees, the majority of the land being undeveloped and used for firing ranges, survival training, etc. [...] Benning is literally just too big to be fenced in...
Sounds similar to Camp Pendleton, in Southern California. Maybe these "security blimps" can keep undocumented immigrants from taking shelter in the trash dumpsters used as targets on heavy weapons live fire ranges.
Save Linked Media:
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all files linked to from the page you're currently looking at by hitting Ctrl+Shift+S. To specify which types you want saved when you do this, use Magpie's Options panel.
Please note: my problem with this is that they are Mozilla supported extensions. perhaps you would actually like to also address that point, yes?
From me: Mozilla is going to support anything that will improve and extend the functionality of their browsers. The more valuable and flexible a tool is, the more widely it will be used and the greater the number of uses to which it will be put.
Much like the word "tool."
The Dalai LLama ...tired of tilting at windmills...
can only be useful in the context of searching for and downloading
hardcore or violent pornography
The emphasis is in the original post and it's an utterly ridiculous claim. Trust me, these fantastic features are every bit as useful and functional for downloading and cataloging even low-key, family-friendly porn that has nothing to do with whips, chains, or farm animals in leather pants.
Besides which, your cheap attempt to inject a little extra hype carries a distinct tone of shrill hysteria, which detracts from any attempt at a more reasoned argument. Your attempt to use one narrow aspect of the whole broad, rich spectrum of glorious pornography is misleading enough that it probably has its own latin name.
I guess it also goes without saying that the uses for tabbed browsing are limited only by the imagination and intelligence of the person who browses.
Consequently, your options may be severely limited. Let me help you get started.
You don't have to use Firefox's handy extensions on pictures of porn. Because Satan and his Mozillian Minions made them available through the GPL for free, you can use them to collect and trade pictures of Jesus or even pictures of beautiful cathedrals, without ever worrying that your licensing fee will be used to fund sex-correction surgery for a 16-year old Taiwanese lady-boy.
If you have Bible questions, you can open a tab for each answer, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to hide those words in your heart.
Tabbed browsing is so useful that you can go to the Anti-Porn Guy's website and open each of his informative links in its own window to find others who will help you with your crusade against tabbed browsing.
To sum up: tabbed browsing is your friend. Whether you are cruising www.hotasiansluts.com or www.jesus.com, tabbed browsing can make your internet experience faster, easier, and better.
The Dalai Llama ...tab for the children...
P.S. - I gather that your tirade against tabbed browsing is a recurring theme. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.
A profit margin is not a reasonable justification in the Union Carbide case, but what does it have to do with the profit margin, anyway?
I've given away the book where I first learned about the Bhopal thing, but if I remember right the initial explosion was due to the factory deliberately disregarding safety measures in order to increase production. Even if I'm not remembering correctly with regard to Bhopal (I know it's bad form to not provide links to supporting evidence, but I'm just too damned tired to dig tonight), companies do this stuff all the time to maximize profits - everything from keeping their coffee too hot to clear-cutting old growth forests to running their truckers so hard that they are relying on over-the-counter speed to stay awake. When I talked about plants poisoning towns and treating workers as disposable assembly line components, to be used up and replaced, I was thinking of the plants that have relocated to Mexico specifically for the purpose of increasing profits by skirting environmental and labor regulations.
but the society (or different societies) decides on what the acceptable level of risk is through making laws about industrial safety
I agree that a certain level of pollution and risk is inevitable when you're working with the types of chemicals used to create the fabric of our modern world, but I think that's all the more reason why we should be forcing these companies to take more precautions. Big corporations should, if anything, be subject to more scrutiny and accountability. We are setting the laws, but we don't care enough to ensure that they are enforced. Also, call me cynical, but until there is some pretty sincere campaign finance reform, I'm not sure I can trust the government to enact fair legislation. Again, I am not an economist, but I would think that bad legislation could inhibit normal free-market checks and balances.
I'm not an expert on economics in general or the Soviet economy in particular, but I was under the impression (gathered while I was young and impressionable) that one of the main problems in the Soviet economy was the same sort of lack of accountability, just for a different reason. Instead of profit as a motive to cut corners, workers had a guaranteed lack of profit as a reason. Production was low, maintenance checks were not always completed on time, etc. but everybody got just enough done to get by and fudged the rest because they would get the same benefit whether they worked hard or not.
Kaa's Second Law, unfortunately, seems to have the ring of truth to me, but I'm still idealistic enough to think that there should be a viable alternative. Our government (I live in the U.S. and embrace my perception of its ideals) should be acting in the best interest of the people. Corporations should be allowed to conduct their business within the limits of the law and when they exceed those limits (i.e. - too many ppm of a toxin dumped into an aquifer) the government should put the smack down on them in such a way that the consequences are enough to deter further violations.
Your point about societies determining what is acceptable is a good one, and ultimately we get what we pay for. Corporations are like governments and private citizens in at least one respect: we all get away with as much as we possibly can.;)
The Dalai LLama ...post disjointed...can't rant...left-wing commie pinko liberal rhetoric failing... must sleep...
You were correct to point out a couple of the mistakes in my post, and I'll concede the points (more or less) gracefully. As a matter of fact, I work for a non-profit corporation, so I feel extra-silly for not drawing a finer distinction between for-profit and non-profit corporations.
Your point about the difference between corporate shareholders and corporate officers is also well-made, and serves to point out that my fingers are often ahead of my brain and that there will always be someone who knows more than I do about a given subject (you may rest assured that this will not prevent me from relentlessly propagating my own ill-considered viewpoints).
The main thrust of my original post, however, is that (at least from where I'm standing) corporations are not held accountable for their actions the same way an individual would be.
I agree with your point that mom and pop shouldn't lose the farm because they invested in SCO unwisely, and I recognize that without some degree of insulation nobody would ever be able to invest in the businesses that drive our economy and create beneficial industry and technology, but I also think that a profit margin is not a reasonable justification for a society to allow Union Carbide to kill 8,000 Indians with impunity and a couple points on margin should not justify poisoning the air we breathe and the water we drink. When a company can poison an entire town, something's wrong. When human factory workers become a disposable commodity, something is wrong.
How to fix it without dismantling the free-market economy, I'll leave to those wiser than myself.
I know I lean a little left sometimes. I just want my kid to have reasonable health care at a reasonable price, clean water that doesn't cost $4 a gallon, and the knowledge that if my gas company poisons us in our sleep for an extra half-cent per cubic foot, someone in my government will make them pay so that it doesn't happen to anybody else's family.
The Dalai LLama ...Kaa's Law is a stroke of genius...
Too bad I don't have mod points...and even if I did, the max score is 5. *sigh* Such intelligence is inspiring.
Troll?
I could be wrong, but given the quality of the grandparent post, and the lack of anything really snarky in the parent, I think it was probably in earnest.
The Dalai Llama ... somebody with mod points hook a guy up so he can at least break even...
The difference between you and a corporation is that your sole purpose is not to make money. A corporation exists only to make money. If they give away free medicine to kids, it's to improve their image so they can make money. If killing 8,000 people in Bhopal will make them money, you better hope you don't live in Bhopal. Making money is the purpose of a corporation.
I think that part of what's needling you is that corporations are being granted some of the rights that individuals enjoy, yet they exist only to make money are not subject to the same constraints that individuals are. You can't throw a corporation in jail for murdering someone. You can throw the CEO in jail if he screws up badly enough, but it's a little tougher when you remember that corporations were created for the sole purpose of distancing corporate decision makers from the consequences of their actions. Also, a distributed decision-making process and distributed accountability reduces each individual employee's share of the guilt to the kind of manageable level that allows for some really spectacularly bad shit to happen.
A lot of people who otherwise believe in laissez faire and the free-market are troubled by the zaibatsu-style mega corporations because they have grown large enough and influential enough to circumvent many of the normal free-market checks and balances.
The Dalai Llama ... I am not an economist, but watching increasingly smaller numbers of people control increasingly larger numbers of increasingly limited shared resources is making me increasingly worried...
Text-based config tools..you need in case the GUI goes wrong..as in setting up the X server. I'm pretty sure most distros have such tools, but there needs to be standardization in naming them.
Hear, hear! I had a problem with an upgrade that killed the GUI and the fix required me to edit some kind of X86 config file. If you don't know your way around Linux, even something this simple can be a daunting task. Much of the documentation I came across took it for granted that I would know how to edit the file.
"Edit the X86 config file to read...." "Edit it? EDIT IT HOW?!?!
Where's that damn Windows disk...."
The Dalai LLama ...joe X86conf?!?! What the fuck does "Joe" have to do with anything?....
Regarding your sig: A lapdance is so much better when the stripper is crying...
I think Peter Hand may have borrowed the phrase from The Bloodhound Gang. My copy of the liner notes is in my car with my chick at my kid's soccer practice, so I can't check, but the complete song lyrics can be found on their site. The song is great. It's on "Hooray for Boobies", a truly masterful album that also contains "The Ballad of Chasey Lain" and "The Bad Touch" (a song for which the AT&T service would be useful, since everybody always tries to find it under "The Discovery Channel Song" or something similar).
The Dalai LLama "Would I be a good messiah with my low self esteem? If I don't believe in myself, would that be blasphemy?" - The Bloodhound Gang
You can type a phrase or two from the lyrics into the amazing Google Intarweb Music Identification Service (it looks deceptively like the main Google page). I've had pretty good results that way.
Or you could use the Ask-Your-Music-Geek-Friend identification service, which is generally provided free of charge by your music-geek friends.
Sounds like another nifty-but-useless service that is probably laying the groundwork for something truly beneficial that is soon to come. Help for those with hearing or speech disabilities or cleaning up garbled telecom messages maybe?
The Dalai Llama ...sign me up when there's a service that identifies which movie a cool quote comes from...
What kind of privacy do you expect when you're in a 3000 lb vehicle going 90+ mph on a public road?
Agreed. I don't think privacy extends to one's public actions, and the roads are one of the few places in today's world where you are likely to be killed as a direct result of someone else's discourtesy or ignorance. As a bike rider, I'm all for it.
If the black boxes ever start wiring home to big brother, however, I reserve the right to change my tune.
The Dalai Llama ...leftist, America-loving pussy extraordinaire...
In fact he went on to say that the ones with incredible amounts on money are the ones that are actually constructing law. Not exactly top secret information, but it still doesn't make me tingly when I hear it again.
I read an interesting book called The Culture of Make Believe that advanced the idea that one way to de-link political power from wealth would be to make the value of every vote inversely proportional to the amount of money the voter has. Which is to say that the more money a person has, the less his vote counts (just a clarifier, since I often wind up inverting the intended meaning of "inversely proportional").
IANAPSG (I am not a political-science guy), and I'm sure it could never be workable, and it doesn't address campaign contributions, and it's blatantly discriminatory, and it's patently ridiculous, and so on, but the idea's got a nice ring to it, anyway.
Especially at 3 am.
The Dalai LLama ...think I'm a Lefty? This guy makes me look like Ashcroft...
Is it just me, or is the guy responsible* for the software that was the subject of the article that sparked the whole thread sitting here with an unmodded post?
I don't know, +1 "Interesting," at least? That third paragraph sounds "Informative" to me, can somebody with mod points hook a brother up?
Do it for the children.
The Dalai LLama ...doesn't have a well-developed sense of irony... does this count?...
*This was to make the paragraph smoother. He seems pretty humble on the site he referenced; I'm sure he'd want it noted that he didn't do it by himself.
I've seen a number of posters commenting on the weightiness of Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver (which I have yet to read).
If you are not familiar with Stephenson and want a brief introduction, I recommend Zodiac. It's a quick, entertaining page-turner that can be read in one sitting but still gives you a pretty good feel for his writing.
Sort of like Neal Stephenson Lite
The Dalai Llama ... absolutely loved Interface and didn't find out Stephenson wrote it until a month ago on/....
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it would for people who are already interested enough to follow through with the effort it would take. The cool thing about the CD is that it's portable, easy and cheap to reproduce, and most important: it's very convenient.
I'm using Linux for most of my computing because somebody handed me a throw-away Knoppix CD. If he had told me, "Hey, there's this cool Knoppix thing that lets you try Linux with no hassles. You can download all 658 Megs for free!" I'd probably still be using Win98 exclusively.
The Dalai LLama
...LLam's LLaw: If x is the amount of bullshit someone has to wade through to try something new and y represents the likelihood that they will actually do so, then the value of x is inversely proportional to the value of y ....
The pay per click ads are just the warm-up.
What they're really banking on is damages awarded for their carpal tunnel syndrome lawsuits.
The Dalai LLama
...damn, we're outsourcing SCO's gig...
I don't know if this is off-topic or if someone has mentioned something similar; I doubt anyone will even see this post at this point in the discussion, but I'm going to tell the story, anyway. This story relates one simple thing anybody doing activities with kids can do to encourage at least one kid to appreciate the value of math and science; with enough people doing it, maybe we can stem another article like this 20 years from now. Bear with me, I know how much the story sounds like a geeked-out after school special.
When I was a kid at summer camp they broke us down into teams for a day-long competition. Each event was designed to promote the usual values: faster, bigger, stronger, more aggressive. At the end of the day, our team was tied for first with one other team as we headed into the final event.
All the campers were standing in a grassy area next to the lake, surrounding the lifeguard tower. The guy on the tower asked each team to pick out their smartest member. Obviously, I got picked (mostly, I think, since I was the nerdiest looking ).
We stood in the center of a crowd of two hundred or so sweaty junior-high faces, all intently focused on us. The counselor would read a series of numbers and operations; our job was to follow the series in our heads. After the last number, the first contestant to give the closest answer to the actual value won the competetion.
In dead silence, the counselor started the competition. "30...plus 12...minus 17...times 2...plus 4...etc." It felt like my head would explode, but I followed as best I could, until the counselor said, "Done."
The silence was painful. I waited for a moment, typically unsure of myself, then said (in a meek, supremely wussy voice), "35." The counselor asked if the other contestants had their guesses. After one of the most excruciating 5-second periods of my life, they gave answers that were nowhere near mine (sending me into a panic).
The sadistic counselor waited a bit, then turned to me and said, "I'm sorry, your answer is....ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!"
The crowd went wild; not just my team, everybody. For the next day or two, I was a hero. An absolute fucking hero. Hot chicks congratulated me (they didn't offer to date me, but I took what I could get).
I'd like to say that it steered me into a career as a mathematician, but it didn't. I wish the feat itself had been more impressive (I'm sure most /.ers can solve 4th-order systems in their heads). It wasn't a big deal, but it did give me the idea that math is a beautiful thing in and of itself, and it did something else that was more important.
It showed every kid at that camp that being smart was valuable and that being smart had a place alongside being strong, fast, and aggressive.
Again, I know that's a cheesy little story that doesn't do much but make me look pathetic, but maybe the activity can help someone looking to inspire a kid or two.
The Dalai LLama
...I was cool for an afternoon once, I promise...
It's been a while since we had that T.I. 99-4A, let's see if I remember this right...
10 LET X=100,000,000
20 PRINT X
30 LET X=(X-1)
40 NEXT X
50 IF X=0, THEN GOTO 80
60 GOTO 20
70 BEEP
80 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST"
90 GOTO 70
100 END
That may not be exactly right, but you should get the gist. I also had some kind of delay mechanism to keep the computer from counting down too fast; I could get two or three going at once before the first one went off, but it's been too long and those lines represent the sum total of my programming knowledge.
The Dalai LLama
...hit ENTER and scramble to watch from outside the store....hell, yeah, I'm a l337 h4X0r...
I'm not technically adept enough to argue the qualities of the app itself, but I think it's interesting to note that a couple of posters have mentioned that KCEasy folded easily.
The above is what concerns me. I don't know jack about German law, but I think it's sad that we are again seeing that the mere threat of possible legal action is an effective deterrent.
Today's Davids will never even get a shot at their Goliaths if they can't even afford the price of admission to the arena.
The Dalai Llama
...yeah, I know they fought in an open field...whatever...
"Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"
What a great euphemism.
The Dalai LLama
...sure, I'll cooperate...just do me a favor and disconnect these electrified alligator clamps from my nipples...right, right...you're the dictator, whatever you say, just put down the hacksaw...
Sounds similar to Camp Pendleton, in Southern California. Maybe these "security blimps" can keep undocumented immigrants from taking shelter in the trash dumpsters used as targets on heavy weapons live fire ranges.
The Dalai Llama
...ouch...
Touche. I'm going to set down my lance, magpie myself some hot swimwear pics, and try to get this fish-hook out of my mouth.
The Dalai LLama
...note to self: mind using words with "woman-hating connotations"...
From you:
From the Magpie site:
From me:
You can use Magpie to go to a page with nothing but sound clips from the movie "Clerks" and you can download all the quotes. No porn involved.
From you:
From me:
Mozilla is going to support anything that will improve and extend the functionality of their browsers. The more valuable and flexible a tool is, the more widely it will be used and the greater the number of uses to which it will be put.
Much like the word "tool."
The Dalai LLama
...tired of tilting at windmills...
You idiot! AFA.ORG links to the Air Force Association's website, not the American Family Association's.
Damn, you're stupid. Did you miss the part where it says "Check those URLs!"? Hint: it's right above the "submit" button.
The Dalai LLama
...hoping to beat somebody to the punch...slow lunch hour...
I hate to feed the trolls but criminy...
The emphasis is in the original post and it's an utterly ridiculous claim. Trust me, these fantastic features are every bit as useful and functional for downloading and cataloging even low-key, family-friendly porn that has nothing to do with whips, chains, or farm animals in leather pants.
Besides which, your cheap attempt to inject a little extra hype carries a distinct tone of shrill hysteria, which detracts from any attempt at a more reasoned argument. Your attempt to use one narrow aspect of the whole broad, rich spectrum of glorious pornography is misleading enough that it probably has its own latin name.
I guess it also goes without saying that the uses for tabbed browsing are limited only by the imagination and intelligence of the person who browses.
Consequently, your options may be severely limited. Let me help you get started.
To sum up: tabbed browsing is your friend. Whether you are cruising www.hotasiansluts.com or www.jesus.com, tabbed browsing can make your internet experience faster, easier, and better.
The Dalai Llama
...tab for the children...
P.S. - I gather that your tirade against tabbed browsing is a recurring theme. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.
I've given away the book where I first learned about the Bhopal thing, but if I remember right the initial explosion was due to the factory deliberately disregarding safety measures in order to increase production. Even if I'm not remembering correctly with regard to Bhopal (I know it's bad form to not provide links to supporting evidence, but I'm just too damned tired to dig tonight), companies do this stuff all the time to maximize profits - everything from keeping their coffee too hot to clear-cutting old growth forests to running their truckers so hard that they are relying on over-the-counter speed to stay awake. When I talked about plants poisoning towns and treating workers as disposable assembly line components, to be used up and replaced, I was thinking of the plants that have relocated to Mexico specifically for the purpose of increasing profits by skirting environmental and labor regulations.
I agree that a certain level of pollution and risk is inevitable when you're working with the types of chemicals used to create the fabric of our modern world, but I think that's all the more reason why we should be forcing these companies to take more precautions. Big corporations should, if anything, be subject to more scrutiny and accountability. We are setting the laws, but we don't care enough to ensure that they are enforced. Also, call me cynical, but until there is some pretty sincere campaign finance reform, I'm not sure I can trust the government to enact fair legislation. Again, I am not an economist, but I would think that bad legislation could inhibit normal free-market checks and balances.
I'm not an expert on economics in general or the Soviet economy in particular, but I was under the impression (gathered while I was young and impressionable) that one of the main problems in the Soviet economy was the same sort of lack of accountability, just for a different reason. Instead of profit as a motive to cut corners, workers had a guaranteed lack of profit as a reason. Production was low, maintenance checks were not always completed on time, etc. but everybody got just enough done to get by and fudged the rest because they would get the same benefit whether they worked hard or not.
Kaa's Second Law, unfortunately, seems to have the ring of truth to me, but I'm still idealistic enough to think that there should be a viable alternative. Our government (I live in the U.S. and embrace my perception of its ideals) should be acting in the best interest of the people. Corporations should be allowed to conduct their business within the limits of the law and when they exceed those limits (i.e. - too many ppm of a toxin dumped into an aquifer) the government should put the smack down on them in such a way that the consequences are enough to deter further violations.
Your point about societies determining what is acceptable is a good one, and ultimately we get what we pay for. Corporations are like governments and private citizens in at least one respect: we all get away with as much as we possibly can. ;)
The Dalai LLama
...post disjointed...can't rant...left-wing commie pinko liberal rhetoric failing... must sleep...
You were correct to point out a couple of the mistakes in my post, and I'll concede the points (more or less) gracefully. As a matter of fact, I work for a non-profit corporation, so I feel extra-silly for not drawing a finer distinction between for-profit and non-profit corporations.
Your point about the difference between corporate shareholders and corporate officers is also well-made, and serves to point out that my fingers are often ahead of my brain and that there will always be someone who knows more than I do about a given subject (you may rest assured that this will not prevent me from relentlessly propagating my own ill-considered viewpoints).
The main thrust of my original post, however, is that (at least from where I'm standing) corporations are not held accountable for their actions the same way an individual would be.
I agree with your point that mom and pop shouldn't lose the farm because they invested in SCO unwisely, and I recognize that without some degree of insulation nobody would ever be able to invest in the businesses that drive our economy and create beneficial industry and technology, but I also think that a profit margin is not a reasonable justification for a society to allow Union Carbide to kill 8,000 Indians with impunity and a couple points on margin should not justify poisoning the air we breathe and the water we drink. When a company can poison an entire town, something's wrong. When human factory workers become a disposable commodity, something is wrong.
How to fix it without dismantling the free-market economy, I'll leave to those wiser than myself.
I know I lean a little left sometimes. I just want my kid to have reasonable health care at a reasonable price, clean water that doesn't cost $4 a gallon, and the knowledge that if my gas company poisons us in our sleep for an extra half-cent per cubic foot, someone in my government will make them pay so that it doesn't happen to anybody else's family.
The Dalai LLama
...Kaa's Law is a stroke of genius...
Troll?
I could be wrong, but given the quality of the grandparent post, and the lack of anything really snarky in the parent, I think it was probably in earnest.
The Dalai Llama
... somebody with mod points hook a guy up so he can at least break even...
The difference between you and a corporation is that your sole purpose is not to make money. A corporation exists only to make money. If they give away free medicine to kids, it's to improve their image so they can make money. If killing 8,000 people in Bhopal will make them money, you better hope you don't live in Bhopal. Making money is the purpose of a corporation.
I think that part of what's needling you is that corporations are being granted some of the rights that individuals enjoy, yet they exist only to make money are not subject to the same constraints that individuals are. You can't throw a corporation in jail for murdering someone. You can throw the CEO in jail if he screws up badly enough, but it's a little tougher when you remember that corporations were created for the sole purpose of distancing corporate decision makers from the consequences of their actions. Also, a distributed decision-making process and distributed accountability reduces each individual employee's share of the guilt to the kind of manageable level that allows for some really spectacularly bad shit to happen.
A lot of people who otherwise believe in laissez faire and the free-market are troubled by the zaibatsu-style mega corporations because they have grown large enough and influential enough to circumvent many of the normal free-market checks and balances.
The Dalai Llama
... I am not an economist, but watching increasingly smaller numbers of people control increasingly larger numbers of increasingly limited shared resources is making me increasingly worried...
Hear, hear! I had a problem with an upgrade that killed the GUI and the fix required me to edit some kind of X86 config file. If you don't know your way around Linux, even something this simple can be a daunting task. Much of the documentation I came across took it for granted that I would know how to edit the file.
"Edit the X86 config file to read...."
"Edit it? EDIT IT HOW?!?!
Where's that damn Windows disk...."
The Dalai LLama
...joe X86conf?!?! What the fuck does "Joe" have to do with anything?....
Firefox has an extension that let's you modify css in a bar on the left-hand side and view the changes in the main pane in real-time.
I haven't played with it enough to gauge how effective it will actually be, but it sure looks cool!
The Dalai LLama
....ooooohhhh, shiny!.....
Regarding your sig: A lapdance is so much better when the stripper is crying...
I think Peter Hand may have borrowed the phrase from The Bloodhound Gang. My copy of the liner notes is in my car with my chick at my kid's soccer practice, so I can't check, but the complete song lyrics can be found on their site. The song is great. It's on "Hooray for Boobies", a truly masterful album that also contains "The Ballad of Chasey Lain" and "The Bad Touch" (a song for which the AT&T service would be useful, since everybody always tries to find it under "The Discovery Channel Song" or something similar).
The Dalai LLama
"Would I be a good messiah with my low self esteem? If I don't believe in myself, would that be blasphemy?" - The Bloodhound Gang
Also before Clear Channel put every popular song into every rotation on every station in the northern hemisphere at 15-minute intervals.
If it's the Next Big Thing(tm), you'll probably hear it enough times to memorize the lyrics before they ever get around to identifying the artist.
The Dalai Llama
...hit me baby, one more time...hit me baby, one more time...hit me baby, one more time....
You can type a phrase or two from the lyrics into the amazing Google Intarweb Music Identification Service (it looks deceptively like the main Google page). I've had pretty good results that way.
Or you could use the Ask-Your-Music-Geek-Friend identification service, which is generally provided free of charge by your music-geek friends.
Sounds like another nifty-but-useless service that is probably laying the groundwork for something truly beneficial that is soon to come. Help for those with hearing or speech disabilities or cleaning up garbled telecom messages maybe?
The Dalai Llama
...sign me up when there's a service that identifies which movie a cool quote comes from...
Agreed. I don't think privacy extends to one's public actions, and the roads are one of the few places in today's world where you are likely to be killed as a direct result of someone else's discourtesy or ignorance. As a bike rider, I'm all for it.
If the black boxes ever start wiring home to big brother, however, I reserve the right to change my tune.
The Dalai Llama
...leftist, America-loving pussy extraordinaire...
I read an interesting book called The Culture of Make Believe that advanced the idea that one way to de-link political power from wealth would be to make the value of every vote inversely proportional to the amount of money the voter has. Which is to say that the more money a person has, the less his vote counts (just a clarifier, since I often wind up inverting the intended meaning of "inversely proportional").
IANAPSG (I am not a political-science guy), and I'm sure it could never be workable, and it doesn't address campaign contributions, and it's blatantly discriminatory, and it's patently ridiculous, and so on, but the idea's got a nice ring to it, anyway.
Especially at 3 am.
The Dalai LLama
...think I'm a Lefty? This guy makes me look like Ashcroft...
I feel like I'm missing something.
Is it just me, or is the guy responsible* for the software that was the subject of the article that sparked the whole thread sitting here with an unmodded post?
I don't know, +1 "Interesting," at least? That third paragraph sounds "Informative" to me, can somebody with mod points hook a brother up?
Do it for the children.
The Dalai LLama
...doesn't have a well-developed sense of irony... does this count?...
*This was to make the paragraph smoother. He seems pretty humble on the site he referenced; I'm sure he'd want it noted that he didn't do it by himself.
Speaking of digressions and asides....House of Leaves.
The Dalai Llama
...this post is an aside... but I digress...
I've seen a number of posters commenting on the weightiness of Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver (which I have yet to read).
If you are not familiar with Stephenson and want a brief introduction, I recommend Zodiac. It's a quick, entertaining page-turner that can be read in one sitting but still gives you a pretty good feel for his writing.
Sort of like Neal Stephenson Lite
The Dalai Llama
... absolutely loved Interface and didn't find out Stephenson wrote it until a month ago on /. ...