Especially the part where we went from typically Slashdot arguing (mostly my fault), to agreeing.
I have had many a good argument here on slashdot. There are always those who refuse to make an argument, but there are also many who are intelligent and willing to discuss, wether we agree or not..
Rather than just drop it, email style, I bid you farewell:).
We'll meet again I'm sure.. Thanks for the enjoyable discussion.
C'mon? Who hasn't spent hours on a 300 baud ( 0.3KBps?) connection to the BBS up the street? The battle to get the one phone line going into the board was as grueling as any of the fights inside the game!
Me.. I used to be sysop myself and could play locally:)
"Exile is an even more enjoyable game to play than Elite or Zarch" - David Brabham, author of Elite.
Correction, David is one of the 2 original authors of Elite, the other one is Ian Bell. Seeing the sequals to Elite which were made by David, I am not so sure his opinion counts for much.
emotions are important and usefull, sure. To me however it seems that most "draconian" policies that people advocate have more to do with not thinking about consequences, blatantly ignoring lessons from history, and also ignoring the feelings of others. The fanatism with which such policies are advocated suggests to me that they come more from emotions then from thought however.
"It works because it works for me" is imho not a reasoned response usually, rather, it is the "feeling" that anyone who can't deal isn't worth considering..
I believe that the response to 9/11/2001 has been exactly what the terrorists in Bush's government, and his corporate warmonger allies around the world, was exactly what they hoped to achieve. I'm not sure only whether they knew about it, or even planned/executed it, in advance, rather then "Let It Happen On Purpose", or just switched gears when someone handed them a "slam dunk" they could hijack.
I have no opinion on if they let it happen, did it on purpose, or just grabbed the oppertunity. I do however see some interesting similarities between the response of both government and population to 9/11, and the events following the burning of the reichstag in Berlin in the early 30s. That in no way means I am saying that Bush and co are nazis, but it does imho suggest that they had a clear plan for dealing with such an event to further their own goals.
More constructively, have you read McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village? It's a typically illuminating McLuhan dissertation of "media war", the kind of infowar terrorism fights in the global media. The Wired edition, with marginalia from Joyce, is most entertaining while educating in a fairly short book. I give it to media execs whenever I think they'll read it.
I have read it.
And yet, there is another side to this. Terrorism needs willing "idiots" to perform acts of terror. A "healthy" society is far less likely to provide for many such people. The consequence of this is that while motivation does not define terrorism, dealing with the motivation behind specific acts of terrorism is usefull for dealing with it still.
Goal does not justify the means, but if you are on the receiving end, addressing the goals does make sense regardless of the means.
I think we quite agree.. just took a lot of words to come to that conclusion.
I also agree that not taking action against those wo threaten yo or your friends is not an option. In the current "war on terror" my biggest concern is that living in fear and giving up freedoms is making terrorism a lot more effective. I believe the response to 9/11 was more then any terrorist could hope to achieve.
You are saying that "good" motivations make some actions that create fear for political control "not terrorism". "The end justifies the means."
You really should read better. I will quote myself from the post you just replied to:
That is fine, as long as you apply that label to everyone based on actions and not on motivation I definitely agree.
Then:
We're really talking about the legitimacy of US shutting down a Hezbollah website. The US State Department's classification of Hezbollah as a terrorist org, enemy of the US, is certainly justified. And war is the business of "necessary evil" - that's why "war is hell". Shutting down their website is evil, shooting an enemy is evil. That's why this war must stop. But until it does, failing to do that kind of necessary, lesser evil merely enables the growth of the greater evil. Until we stop this war, one way or another, we're all doing evil.
This is arguing that you have to fight fire with fire, which is a falacy.
The normal consequence of that reasoning is that you end up creating a bigger monster then you are fighting in order to win, which does not work because it just makes you end up with a bigger monster.
Hezbollah is very obviously terrorist. It's insane to even argue about it. As I keep mentioning for the easily baffled in these subthreads,
That is fine, as long as you apply that label to everyone based on actions and not on motivation I definitely agree.
just because Bush has hijacked a Terror War for more bullshit than benefit doesn't make terrorism any less real or diabolical. Hezbollah is diabolical, regardless of the nonexistence of "the Devil". They are evil regardless of the nonexistence of god, theirs or anyone else's, beyond an imaginary principle we use to personify good and evil.
If you use action to define terrorism, then the notions of good and evil no longer play a role.
I know Hezbollah. At what point does seeing their own propaganda, absolutely consistent media presentations (independent, corporate, Arab, Euramerican, Asian, everyone) of them terrorizing people, sink in?
No need for that, it already did. I just oppose painting the same actions with different colours depending on if you agree with the people taking the action.
Only when they cut the throat of your neighbor in front of your face? Does firing missiles give them some kind of "immunity doubt"? Does giving to charity make a killer less lethal?
Did I suggest that anywhere? no.
I did say however that they do serve a legitimate purpose, regardless of if I agree with their methods.
The issue is that you really need to seperate the two, and look at them independently.
That is ofcourse also the ultimate consequence of the argument you are making.
NO. Hezbollah is a terrorist org. Of course it's not as simple as just killing people - I have never said terrorism is defined by murder. It is defined, as I keep saying, by using fear for political control. Which doesn't exclude using other PR for political control, or doing other things (like fundraising) only indirectly for political control.
All fine with me as long as you apply the same standards to all sides, and with disregard of if you agree with the underlying motivations.
Hezbollah calls for destruction and elimination of Israel. I am sorry what equal rights to give to those whose sole mission is elimination of Israel as a state?
Hezbollah's existance is the direct consequence of Israeli occupation of south Lebanon (this was in response to the PLO using it as a base of operations against Israel)
The sadest part about that story is that initially, the Shia population of south Lebanon welcomed the Israelis as liberators because they really wanted to get rid of the PLO there.
Instead of working with them, Israel gave the SLA a free hand (them being christian, not muslim, supposedly that made them more trustworthy), resulting in the slaughter of thousands of refugees. Then Israel did not leave when the PLO was driven out.
It is those circumstances that opened an oppertunity for Iran to export its Islamic revolution and resulted in the founding of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah being a Lebanese organistation, and historically a legitimate resistance movement, makes your argument rather silly. There is no granting of equal rights to Hezbollah, they already have that in the country where they belong.
I suspect you are confusing Hezbollah and Hamas, the later live in Israeli occupied territories, and indeed the people in those territories are discriminated against. That does not justify their attacks on civilians, but their demand for equal treatment is still justified regardless of that.
Well yes, launching missiles at an old disabled man while leaving a mosk, killing another and injuring some more on the way, risking damage to a religious building and its visitors.. really sounds like making peace to me.
Responding toa legitimate military tactic of taking MILITARY prisoners by harrassing and killing civilians (supposedly in puruit of 'terrorists') sounds like making peace indeed.
Occupying territory as a result of defending oneself is definitely legitimate, but annexating that territory is definitely not. It is not because the consequences of that have been known for a long time, it results in war, war and more war. This is why any country that is a member of the UN has agreed with its founding charter which make this explicitly illegal, yet what does Israel do? annexate Jarusalem and parts of the occupied territories. That is a historically proven way to continue war.
Their intention may very well be to live in peace and let others live in peace, but most of their actions contradict this.
The difference with the one small period where they did take the right actions is so blatantly obvious that I simply cannot believe you are missing it, but then, maybe you weren't there. I have travelled in Israel, the west bank, Lebanon and Gaza, without having to fear for my own life, either from Israeli or Pellestinian attacks. That is not even that long ago. The one difference is the person who was in charge in Israel and his policies for solving the problems there.
You see so much bullshit around you that you are missing your own bullshit it seems..
Terrorizing civilians to get your way? That makes Israel a terrorist country. It makes the USA a terrorist country, it makes the UK a terrorist country, and we can go on, this list is rather long.
Bombing civilians in order to get a change was definitely done by the USA, clear examples go back at least to the second world war.
Now, I bet you are going to argue that dropping culear bombs on Japan and for example the bombing of Dresden were not terrorism because of the motivations for commiting those acts, but if you do that then you better apply the same argument to Hezbollah. As others have pointed out already, you know so little of whom they are that you are in no position whatsoever to judge this.
The point is that terrorist is a word that is used in a fasion similar to the word "devil", it is used to paint those whom we disagree with as evil. As long as you do not understand that simple thing you are an extremely easy target for propaganda, and your opinion is not based on anything resembling reality.
You do realise if they were changing the win32 api in such a way to break things
I am talking about win32s, that is NOT the same as win32.
, the software would break on Microsoft's own OS too
No it would not.
OS/2 provided windows compatibility in the sense of it being able to run a full version of Windows (3.1) with a few very small binary patches.
Those binary patches have to do with memory management and interfacing with the OS/2 GUI.
What happened a lot was that newer applications simply required a newer version of the win32s dll due to the mentioned trivial changes to the api, which would also contain just enough changes to memory management to break on OS/2.
Since the underlying OS in case of plain Windows 3.1 was DOS, and DOS simply did not care about memory management to begin with, nothing broke regardless of what MS did.
That breaking OS/2 was the purpose is a widely held suspicion, but is not proven. That they made the mentioned changes to the win32s api however is historical fact.
Are you fucking uncapable of making a normal argument?
Microsoft fucking with OS/2's "run Windows apps without buying Windows" and Microsoft fucking with "buy a copy of Windows to run on your Mac" are two completely different things.
And the issue here is that you are lacking some rather important knowledge.
1. Microsoft did get payed for a Winows license for every copy of OS/2 that included this support out of the box
2. There existed a cheaper OS/2 for Windows version which required a Microsoft Windows 3.1 version from Microsoft.
2. is completely comparable to the situation we are talking about, and in case of 1. they were being compensated for the OS and could sell their applications.
So lets see, I wont call you retarded, ignorant hits it better.
Sure, that is why they kept making trivial changes to the win32s api that served little or no technical purpose, requiring a new version of a dll that would break on OS/2. Each time IBM fixed this, they did it again, thereby ensuring people could not run the latest Windows software (including the software sold by MS itself)
If there was a 'strategic' reason for this (preserving customer lockin for example) then surely they did such things in the past, and I have not yet found a reason to believe they changed.
People fight all the time to stay in prison for the rest of their lives instead of being executed. It appears that some of the prisoners slated for execution find that death is worse then spending the rest of their life not having a say over their own life in any way.
The total number of prisoners in the USA troughout its existance pales in comparison to the number of people who died fighting for their freedom.
On the other hand, murder is the only crime where the punishment can't be worse than the crime
This is based on the assumption that death is worse then spending the rest of your life not having a say over your own life in any way (ie, imprisonment for life).
I'm not talking for others. I'm stating a common cultural practice.
This is a common practise among people involved in sales activities, it is definitely not a common practise among those involved in say technical support.
Perhaps when you have business cards made for yourself and your organization you should consider how others treat/use business cards. They certainly aren't treated as personal communiques or sensitive/confidential personal information like letters.
If I somehow get the business card of the lead designer of some very high profile product, I definitely treat it as confidential information, if however I get the card of a sales representative of the company selling that product, I treat it differently.
If you don't want a particular contact to get out, don't put it on your business cards. It's customary to put your public business contacts on a card, and if you want to give a particular person more private contact info you write it on the back of the card.
Well, I actually keep two different cards to prevent this problem, and one indeed states very explicitly that this is private information. Still, the fact that I give you certain information is in itself not permission for you to distribute said information.
And what is this rubbish about copyright? People aren't trying to profit off of your precious business card design. What is being traded here is contact info.
Which seems to have some value indeed..
It just makes the most sense to present your company's contact in the manner that it's presented on a business card since that's a graphical representation that you've chosen for yourself.
And that is exactly where you go wrong. I never authorized you to represent my company to begin with.
If I've invested the time and money to have a business card designed, then I'd sure as hell like for my contact info to be presented to potential business partners in this manner when someone else puts my contact out there. I'm the one benefitting from the design and the impression it makes on potential business partners.
The problem is simply that you are reasoning from an extremely narrow point of view, only considering YOUR particular use of business cards.
That is why I said you should not talk for others, it may be difficult to imagine maybe, but others can have entirely different ideas then you have.
I recall politely asking people not to smoke and getting either ignored or a somewhat hostile reaction. I expect that they laws are backlash from this ( I am sure I am not the only one who experienced such )
I have seen the same, and I consider such people to be rather uncivilized. You are prbably right that current laws are a response to this, but really, going from one extreme to another extreme is not going to make for a better situation. I'd hope that those who make laws overthere are aware of that. Supposedly there exists a representative form of democracy in the USA to prevent such kinds of idiocy and mob-rule style responses...
I'll allow that it's conceivable that HP might have had some contractual or moral right to snoop on their board members.
Your explanation:
Note that I said "concievable" instead of "likely".
A snowball's chance in hell is still theoretically nonzero.:-)
Unless laws in the USA are seriously broken, HP having a legal right of snooping on its board members (by contract or not) does not even have a snowballs chance in hell, so no, it is not conceivable. I am not even going to argue about a possible moral right.
The problem is that you cannot allow companies to include serious invasions of privacy in their employment contracts. The position of an employer over employees is a lot stronger, so you have to put limits on what they can put in contracts, unless you want to end up with a society like we had during feodal times in Europe for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Just pull into the polling place on your way to the supermarket.
Hmm, those supermarkets.. there are no people working there I guess? or are those people so unimportant that their vote is not wanted anyway?
Especially the part where we went from typically Slashdot arguing (mostly my fault), to agreeing.
:).
I have had many a good argument here on slashdot. There are always those who refuse to make an argument, but there are also many who are intelligent and willing to discuss, wether we agree or not..
Rather than just drop it, email style, I bid you farewell
We'll meet again I'm sure.. Thanks for the enjoyable discussion.
I did as well, and after many fixes and hacks, I even enjoyed first encounters. I wont consider either a good game however.
C'mon? Who hasn't spent hours on a 300 baud ( 0.3KBps?) connection to the BBS up the street? The battle to get the one phone line going into the board was as grueling as any of the fights inside the game!
:)
Me.. I used to be sysop myself and could play locally
"Exile is an even more enjoyable game to play than Elite or Zarch" - David Brabham, author of Elite.
Correction, David is one of the 2 original authors of Elite, the other one is Ian Bell. Seeing the sequals to Elite which were made by David, I am not so sure his opinion counts for much.
emotions are important and usefull, sure. To me however it seems that most "draconian" policies that people advocate have more to do with not thinking about consequences, blatantly ignoring lessons from history, and also ignoring the feelings of others. The fanatism with which such policies are advocated suggests to me that they come more from emotions then from thought however.
"It works because it works for me" is imho not a reasoned response usually, rather, it is the "feeling" that anyone who can't deal isn't worth considering..
Ignorance is key, but there are a few shortcuts being used in cases like dealing with the 9/11 attacks.
I believe one of the historical experts *) in this expressed very well how this works:
"Make people feel so they don't think."
It provides an effective way to make this work even when people arent so ignorant.
After the attacks it was easy to call on anger and fear.
*) quote from Adolf Hitler.
I believe that the response to 9/11/2001 has been exactly what the terrorists in Bush's government, and his corporate warmonger allies around the world, was exactly what they hoped to achieve. I'm not sure only whether they knew about it, or even planned/executed it, in advance, rather then "Let It Happen On Purpose", or just switched gears when someone handed them a "slam dunk" they could hijack.
I have no opinion on if they let it happen, did it on purpose, or just grabbed the oppertunity. I do however see some interesting similarities between the response of both government and population to 9/11, and the events following the burning of the reichstag in Berlin in the early 30s. That in no way means I am saying that Bush and co are nazis, but it does imho suggest that they had a clear plan for dealing with such an event to further their own goals.
More constructively, have you read McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village? It's a typically illuminating McLuhan dissertation of "media war", the kind of infowar terrorism fights in the global media. The Wired edition, with marginalia from Joyce, is most entertaining while educating in a fairly short book. I give it to media execs whenever I think they'll read it.
I have read it.
And yet, there is another side to this. Terrorism needs willing "idiots" to perform acts of terror. A "healthy" society is far less likely to provide for many such people. The consequence of this is that while motivation does not define terrorism, dealing with the motivation behind specific acts of terrorism is usefull for dealing with it still.
Goal does not justify the means, but if you are on the receiving end, addressing the goals does make sense regardless of the means.
I think we quite agree.. just took a lot of words to come to that conclusion.
I also agree that not taking action against those wo threaten yo or your friends is not an option. In the current "war on terror" my biggest concern is that living in fear and giving up freedoms is making terrorism a lot more effective. I believe the response to 9/11 was more then any terrorist could hope to achieve.
You are saying that "good" motivations make some actions that create fear for political control "not terrorism". "The end justifies the means."
You really should read better. I will quote myself from the post you just replied to:
That is fine, as long as you apply that label to everyone based on actions and not on motivation I definitely agree.
Then:
We're really talking about the legitimacy of US shutting down a Hezbollah website. The US State Department's classification of Hezbollah as a terrorist org, enemy of the US, is certainly justified. And war is the business of "necessary evil" - that's why "war is hell". Shutting down their website is evil, shooting an enemy is evil. That's why this war must stop. But until it does, failing to do that kind of necessary, lesser evil merely enables the growth of the greater evil. Until we stop this war, one way or another, we're all doing evil.
This is arguing that you have to fight fire with fire, which is a falacy.
The normal consequence of that reasoning is that you end up creating a bigger monster then you are fighting in order to win, which does not work because it just makes you end up with a bigger monster.
Hezbollah is very obviously terrorist. It's insane to even argue about it. As I keep mentioning for the easily baffled in these subthreads,
That is fine, as long as you apply that label to everyone based on actions and not on motivation I definitely agree.
just because Bush has hijacked a Terror War for more bullshit than benefit doesn't make terrorism any less real or diabolical. Hezbollah is diabolical, regardless of the nonexistence of "the Devil". They are evil regardless of the nonexistence of god, theirs or anyone else's, beyond an imaginary principle we use to personify good and evil.
If you use action to define terrorism, then the notions of good and evil no longer play a role.
I know Hezbollah. At what point does seeing their own propaganda, absolutely consistent media presentations (independent, corporate, Arab, Euramerican, Asian, everyone) of them terrorizing people, sink in?
No need for that, it already did. I just oppose painting the same actions with different colours depending on if you agree with the people taking the action.
Only when they cut the throat of your neighbor in front of your face? Does firing missiles give them some kind of "immunity doubt"? Does giving to charity make a killer less lethal?
Did I suggest that anywhere? no.
I did say however that they do serve a legitimate purpose, regardless of if I agree with their methods.
The issue is that you really need to seperate the two, and look at them independently.
That is ofcourse also the ultimate consequence of the argument you are making.
NO. Hezbollah is a terrorist org. Of course it's not as simple as just killing people - I have never said terrorism is defined by murder. It is defined, as I keep saying, by using fear for political control. Which doesn't exclude using other PR for political control, or doing other things (like fundraising) only indirectly for political control.
All fine with me as long as you apply the same standards to all sides, and with disregard of if you agree with the underlying motivations.
Hezbollah calls for destruction and elimination of Israel. I am sorry what equal rights to give to those whose sole mission is elimination of Israel as a state?
Hezbollah's existance is the direct consequence of Israeli occupation of south Lebanon (this was in response to the PLO using it as a base of operations against Israel)
The sadest part about that story is that initially, the Shia population of south Lebanon welcomed the Israelis as liberators because they really wanted to get rid of the PLO there.
Instead of working with them, Israel gave the SLA a free hand (them being christian, not muslim, supposedly that made them more trustworthy), resulting in the slaughter of thousands of refugees. Then Israel did not leave when the PLO was driven out.
It is those circumstances that opened an oppertunity for Iran to export its Islamic revolution and resulted in the founding of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah being a Lebanese organistation, and historically a legitimate resistance movement, makes your argument rather silly. There is no granting of equal rights to Hezbollah, they already have that in the country where they belong.
I suspect you are confusing Hezbollah and Hamas, the later live in Israeli occupied territories, and indeed the people in those territories are discriminated against. That does not justify their attacks on civilians, but their demand for equal treatment is still justified regardless of that.
Don't confuse cause and effect.
Well yes, launching missiles at an old disabled man while leaving a mosk, killing another and injuring some more on the way, risking damage to a religious building and its visitors.. really sounds like making peace to me.
Responding toa legitimate military tactic of taking MILITARY prisoners by harrassing and killing civilians (supposedly in puruit of 'terrorists') sounds like making peace indeed.
Occupying territory as a result of defending oneself is definitely legitimate, but annexating that territory is definitely not. It is not because the consequences of that have been known for a long time, it results in war, war and more war. This is why any country that is a member of the UN has agreed with its founding charter which make this explicitly illegal, yet what does Israel do? annexate Jarusalem and parts of the occupied territories. That is a historically proven way to continue war.
Their intention may very well be to live in peace and let others live in peace, but most of their actions contradict this.
The difference with the one small period where they did take the right actions is so blatantly obvious that I simply cannot believe you are missing it, but then, maybe you weren't there. I have travelled in Israel, the west bank, Lebanon and Gaza, without having to fear for my own life, either from Israeli or Pellestinian attacks. That is not even that long ago. The one difference is the person who was in charge in Israel and his policies for solving the problems there.
You see so much bullshit around you that you are missing your own bullshit it seems..
Terrorizing civilians to get your way? That makes Israel a terrorist country. It makes the USA a terrorist country, it makes the UK a terrorist country, and we can go on, this list is rather long.
Bombing civilians in order to get a change was definitely done by the USA, clear examples go back at least to the second world war.
Now, I bet you are going to argue that dropping culear bombs on Japan and for example the bombing of Dresden were not terrorism because of the motivations for commiting those acts, but if you do that then you better apply the same argument to Hezbollah. As others have pointed out already, you know so little of whom they are that you are in no position whatsoever to judge this.
The point is that terrorist is a word that is used in a fasion similar to the word "devil", it is used to paint those whom we disagree with as evil. As long as you do not understand that simple thing you are an extremely easy target for propaganda, and your opinion is not based on anything resembling reality.
You do realise if they were changing the win32 api in such a way to break things
I am talking about win32s, that is NOT the same as win32.
, the software would break on Microsoft's own OS too
No it would not.
OS/2 provided windows compatibility in the sense of it being able to run a full version of Windows (3.1) with a few very small binary patches.
Those binary patches have to do with memory management and interfacing with the OS/2 GUI.
What happened a lot was that newer applications simply required a newer version of the win32s dll due to the mentioned trivial changes to the api, which would also contain just enough changes to memory management to break on OS/2.
Since the underlying OS in case of plain Windows 3.1 was DOS, and DOS simply did not care about memory management to begin with, nothing broke regardless of what MS did.
That breaking OS/2 was the purpose is a widely held suspicion, but is not proven. That they made the mentioned changes to the win32s api however is historical fact.
Are you fucking retarded? Seriously.
Are you fucking uncapable of making a normal argument?
Microsoft fucking with OS/2's "run Windows apps without buying Windows" and Microsoft fucking with "buy a copy of Windows to run on your Mac" are two completely different things.
And the issue here is that you are lacking some rather important knowledge.
1. Microsoft did get payed for a Winows license for every copy of OS/2 that included this support out of the box
2. There existed a cheaper OS/2 for Windows version which required a Microsoft Windows 3.1 version from Microsoft.
2. is completely comparable to the situation we are talking about, and in case of 1. they were being compensated for the OS and could sell their applications.
So lets see, I wont call you retarded, ignorant hits it better.
Sure, that is why they kept making trivial changes to the win32s api that served little or no technical purpose, requiring a new version of a dll that would break on OS/2. Each time IBM fixed this, they did it again, thereby ensuring people could not run the latest Windows software (including the software sold by MS itself)
If there was a 'strategic' reason for this (preserving customer lockin for example) then surely they did such things in the past, and I have not yet found a reason to believe they changed.
Good to see that we agree for once :)
First you said The only solution is not to build attachments or loyalties in the first place.
Then you said As soon as they make the first mistake show no mercy. Dump them, move on and tell all your freinds to avoid them too.
A negative attachment is still an attachment, so your second statement seems to contradict yor first.
If you don't want brand loyality, use the product when it is good, don't use it when it is bad.
People fight all the time to stay in prison for the rest of their lives instead of being executed. It appears that some of the prisoners slated for execution find that death is worse then spending the rest of their life not having a say over their own life in any way.
The total number of prisoners in the USA troughout its existance pales in comparison to the number of people who died fighting for their freedom.
On the other hand, murder is the only crime where the punishment can't be worse than the crime
This is based on the assumption that death is worse then spending the rest of your life not having a say over your own life in any way (ie, imprisonment for life).
I don't believe that assumption is correct.
I'm not talking for others. I'm stating a common cultural practice.
This is a common practise among people involved in sales activities, it is definitely not a common practise among those involved in say technical support.
Perhaps when you have business cards made for yourself and your organization you should consider how others treat/use business cards. They certainly aren't treated as personal communiques or sensitive/confidential personal information like letters.
If I somehow get the business card of the lead designer of some very high profile product, I definitely treat it as confidential information, if however I get the card of a sales representative of the company selling that product, I treat it differently.
If you don't want a particular contact to get out, don't put it on your business cards. It's customary to put your public business contacts on a card, and if you want to give a particular person more private contact info you write it on the back of the card.
Well, I actually keep two different cards to prevent this problem, and one indeed states very explicitly that this is private information. Still, the fact that I give you certain information is in itself not permission for you to distribute said information.
And what is this rubbish about copyright? People aren't trying to profit off of your precious business card design. What is being traded here is contact info.
Which seems to have some value indeed..
It just makes the most sense to present your company's contact in the manner that it's presented on a business card since that's a graphical representation that you've chosen for yourself.
And that is exactly where you go wrong. I never authorized you to represent my company to begin with.
If I've invested the time and money to have a business card designed, then I'd sure as hell like for my contact info to be presented to potential business partners in this manner when someone else puts my contact out there. I'm the one benefitting from the design and the impression it makes on potential business partners.
The problem is simply that you are reasoning from an extremely narrow point of view, only considering YOUR particular use of business cards.
That is why I said you should not talk for others, it may be difficult to imagine maybe, but others can have entirely different ideas then you have.
You, sir, are an idiot.
You are an expert on having a good discussion I see.
You can not copyright your name, address and phone number. Ever hear of a phonebook?
I wonder, did you read any of the other replies to my post?
You are both redundant and rude, please learn to have a proper argument.
I recall politely asking people not to smoke and getting
either ignored or a somewhat hostile reaction. I expect
that they laws are backlash from this ( I am sure I am
not the only one who experienced such )
I have seen the same, and I consider such people to be rather uncivilized. You are prbably right that current laws are a response to this, but really, going from one extreme to another extreme is not going to make for a better situation. I'd hope that those who make laws overthere are aware of that. Supposedly there exists a representative form of democracy in the USA to prevent such kinds of idiocy and mob-rule style responses...
Your original statement:
:-)
I'll allow that it's conceivable that HP might have had some contractual or moral right to snoop on their board members.
Your explanation:
Note that I said "concievable" instead of "likely".
A snowball's chance in hell is still theoretically nonzero.
Unless laws in the USA are seriously broken, HP having a legal right of snooping on its board members (by contract or not) does not even have a snowballs chance in hell, so no, it is not conceivable. I am not even going to argue about a possible moral right.
The problem is that you cannot allow companies to include serious invasions of privacy in their employment contracts. The position of an employer over employees is a lot stronger, so you have to put limits on what they can put in contracts, unless you want to end up with a society like we had during feodal times in Europe for example.