Two months after the house was foreclosed they put it back on the market for about 1 year's worth of payments. It's been on the market for nearly a year now.
Had they simply let me continue making payments they would have already made more than the price they're selling the house for. I'd love to just go pay for the house with cash they sent me, but it's been vandalized since and much of the $$$ was spent on purchasing and moving to a new house.
Yeah, this is the most disturbing thing to me is that it doesn't genuinely benefit anyone. You lost your house. The bank that owned your mortgage made less money out of the deal. Your neighbors probably lost value in their homes by having a cheap, vandalized, vacant house next door. Probably some of all of our tax dollars are going to end up covering the losses one way or another.
I've heard other similar stories, even some where the house becomes so heavily vandalized that the bank decides not to bother to sell it anymore and essentially abandons ownership. Why not just work out some kind of a deal with the occupant?
Re:Missing the point...
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
Secure-FTP (over SSL) is not sufficient as it only encrypts things without verifying the authenticity of the host you are connecting to.
Well what really does verify the authenticity of the host you're connecting to? SFTP doesn't really, it only verifies that the host you're connecting to is the same as the host you connected to before. SSL CAs sort of do, but most of them don't really work that hard to verify who they're giving certs to.
Re:So much for regard
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Probably the same reason why they don't go ahead and replace their CLI environment with some standard-ish Unix shell (e.g. bash) even though it would be a much better solution than their current command line. It's Not-Invented-Here and would increase interoperability, thereby decreasing vendor lock-in. Even if they do implement it, they'll make some weird incompatible implementation with patented "improvements".
... and don't forget "lobbying the government to give you subsidies and preferential treatment." Apparently capitalism doesn't work without that.
Re:Keyloggers don't care
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
Well first, that's a good argument to make sure you don't have a keylogger, but not an argument against encrypting authentication while operating over an insecure network. Really, it's not a whacky or complicated idea. Unencrypted authentication is vulnerable to more types of attacks than encrypted authentication.
But just to argue the point, SFTP can be set up so that a keylogger alone won't get your login credentials. You can use public key authentication instead of a password. Now sure, public key authentication is potentially vulnerable to another sort of attack (someone with local access under your local account can simply copy the private key), but if you just want to talk about keyloggers....
It really should just go away. There's no excuse for using a protocol on the web that includes unencrypted authentication. If you have to set up additional tunneling of one protocol through another protocol just to ensure secure authentication, then your first protocol isn't really doing its job. FTP is simple? I guess, but it stinks. Even today, even using passive mode, you sometimes see weird/stupid problems with FTP going through firewalls and VPN tunnels.
People really should be using SFTP, but it's suffered from some other problems. For one, there hasn't traditionally been any easy/standard way to jail users once they log in. OpenSSH has recently included jailing functionality, but it still requires that users home directories are read-only and owned by root. Second, FTP clients all default to using FTP, and users who are just barely computer literate enough to put in hostname/username/password are put off by having to alter any other settings.
if you look at the root of all religions... you will note that they are attempts to explain that which was, at the time, unexplainable or simply unacceptable
I wouldn't quite say that.. If you look at the root of all superstitions, you'll find that they're attempts to explain what was unexplainable at the time. If you look at the roots of organized religion, you will note that they are attempts by one set of people to control others.
The "organized" part of organized religion is really not too far different from the politics we see every day. Religions may teach true things in much the same way that politicians may make valid arguments. Leaders generally use a mix of common beliefs, valid viewpoints, good philosophical argumentation, superstition, logical fallacies, and psychological tactics to convince people what they should or should not do. Those leaders may have good intentions or bad intentions, and they may be right to convince people of those things or they may be wrong.
Right. The Roman Catholic Church hasn't exactly pro-science throughout its history, but it does has a long tradition of actually studying things, using actual philosophy and theology to try to understand their own religion and the world, rather than trying to impose a simple and strict literal interpretation of the Bible.
One of the weird benefits of centralized authority and papal infallibility has been that it's allowed the church to reinterpret dogma to some degree to keep up with the times. It ends up being a little like the Constitution allowing amendments-- changes can be made without being considered a violation of the original set of rules.
Of course the funny thing is how many Catholics basically don't give a shit what the Pope says, and just believe whatever it is that they believe.
I've got to say this: belief in fictional, mythological spirits can only be damaging to serious discussions about any subject area.
I'm sure many religious people would agree. Of course, they just wouldn't agree that their particular god(s) "fictional".
I think anytime people begin a discussion with their beliefs already determined and a mind closed to thinking in different ways, where the intent is to force others to believe what you believe without any attempt to understand the others' viewpoints, it's going to be an unproductive discussion.
That sort of thing can be caused by religion, but it can be caused by a lot of other things too.
The majority of European scientists used to agree that the earth was flat
Not even that. The greeks knew the Earth was round and had calculated its size pretty accurately. Since then, there hasn't been serious disagreement among scientists or sailors or educated people generally. There may have been some denial from the religious and the simply ignorant, but the story you hear about Columbus being the one who proved the world was round --or whatever the story is-- it's BS.
But the point was that the ball couldn't be held responsible.
No one was arguing that the ball would be held responsible. You were arguing that the owner of the ball is responsible for any damage the ball causes, which obviously is not true. And you agreed. So we're done there.
No, the owner of the car will be liable.
Even according to you, only if the owner was negligent in permitting someone else to drive their car. So we're done there.
No, both the owner and the negligent person is responsible in that situation.
You said, "if I was working for a company, and the situation came about as you described, then when you found out I was over worked and tired driving the car, you could sue the company because they had a duty to ensure I was a safe driver in an appropriate condition to drive". So is the company absolved of responsibility if they don't technically own the car I was driving? If not, then it's further evidence that responsibility doesn't go to the owner of an object, but rather it's the responsibility of those people who were negligent or reckless. So we're done there.
No, no, no. Public welfare does not trump the rights of a business.
No, no, no, no. The point is businesses don't have a "right" to be profitable. Your claim as to why businesses needed to be granted the right to free speech was that otherwise some particular business might not be as profitable. As they have no right to be profitable, I don't see why the need to be profitable demands that they be granted special additional rights.
No where in the constitution does it say it only applies to people in the literal sense
Nowhere does it say that special rights should be granted to non-persons for the sake of profit. Doesn't even imply such a thing.
You've held throughout this argument that a business are inherently the same sort of thing as cars, but we need to grant them "personhood" merely because it's beneficial to those businesses. Should we establish that it would be in the best interest of a car to be considered a "person", is it necessary that we also give cars the freedom of speech? Why not, since the Constitution is silent on the subject? Nowhere does it say, "cars aren't people".
Ok, first of all, no one is granted rights, no one has rights reserved.
Well rights certainly are granted to corporations. Most definitely they are. Corporations are artificial entities with no inherent or God-given rights. And how are rights not reserved for people? I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word "reserve", or are unfamiliar with at least one of its meanings.
But let me spell this out one more fucking time and pay attention this time.
Oh, please do!
The law works by making someone responsible for actions
Right! Actions. That's what I said.
When you remove this aspect of a separate person, you then dump liability onto the owners
Right, back to begging the question, i.e. it would be impossible to limit a person's liability in owning a company without making that company a separate person because only making it a separate person can limit liability. Check.
This screws with it's fiduciary duty of the company and could ruin some of them.
Right, this is bad for companies, and companies have an inalienable constitutional right to profit at the expense of the public welfare.
You most likely depend on a corporation for your job if you are not living in mom's basement and mowing lawns for pizza and mountain dew cash.
Great, a new weird circular argument. Building a system which concentrates economic and political power into corporations is good, and the evidence for this is that corporations currentl
It's one thing to say, "We made $X in the last year," and another to break down that $X to say exactly how much came from each song, how much came from iTunes and how much came from WalMart, and describe exactly where all those numbers came from.
You simply cannot assign blame to an object. This isn't third grade and the ball didn't hurt you, the person who threw it did.
Exactly! The person who threw it, not the person who owns it.
In some states, simply leaving the keys in a reasonably accessible place can make you liable.
Again, yes! The person who leaves the keys in an accessible place, and not the person who owns the car.
In those cases, the owners take responsibility for their own properties and suffer the loss.
It's not that they "take responsibility" and therefore suffer the loss. The loss is already suffered. It's just that, since no one in particular is responsible, no one else is liable to compensate the owner for his loss.
Actually, that is impossible in reality. It might have happened where no one driver is found to of been at fault because of lack of evidence
Erm...?! It's impossible that no one is legally at fault, and yet it might be found that no driver is at fault. Ok.
when you found out I was over worked and tired driving the car, you could sue the company because they had a duty to ensure I was a safe driver in an appropriate condition to drive
Ok, so yet another example where it isn't the owner of property who is responsible, but instead the negligent party that caused the event. Are you trying to make my argument for me?
the right of the public health trumps the right of the business
Exactly my point. That some business might not be as profitable does not trump the public welfare.
this country was founded on the idea of freedom of enterprise
Well it was founded on the idea of maintaining liberty for its citizens, which is utterly irrelevant to the discussion here. The preservation of individual freedom of speech (for a *person*) is vital to the purpose of our government, but guaranteeing profitability of a company is not.
You keep talking about all these various issues (most of which you're wrong about), but you're generally not really addressing the question of why corporations should be granted rights normally reserved for people. As far as I can remember, the only relevant argument you've made this whole time seems to boil down to "lessing the ability of corporations to influence our government might lessen their profitability, which might, in turn, harm our economy." However, that takes for granted the idea that their current level of influence is both acceptable and necessary.
Yeah, I think you're hitting on a point that a lot of people get wrong. People get all wrapped up in the idea, "Well without copyright, musicians won't be able to get paid enough, and no one will make music anymore!" Of course that's not true. People are pretty musical all on their own. They made music before copyright, and people still make music even when they aren't getting paid. I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that we could go as far as to outlaw all composition, playing, or recording of music, and there would still be lots of people willing to risk life and limb in breaking those laws.
So really, that's just not the issue.
Look at the history of the copyright, and you'll find that the main concern was not to ensure a business model whereby creative people or publishers would be ensured a highly profitable business. The big idea was more to ensure that the creative folk got a fair cut of whatever profits were to be had.
It has nothing to do with the downloader needing any rights.
So if the downloader doesn't need rights, then I'm allowed to download whatever software or movies or music I want, so long as I'm not distributing them?
Well, if you're running a commercial airline and you allow the aeronautical engineers to design the interior of the aircraft (including seats, lighting, fixtures) without including anyone with interior design experience, then yes, that might be a problem. If you allow the aeronautical engineers to design the menu for the inflight meals without consulting any kind of chef or caterer, then that might be a problem too.
they'd be up a creek without a paddle if they used Webkit and people stopped developing for it or licensed Gecko from Firefox and they went under or yanked Microsoft's license.
Well for one thing, if it adheres to standards, there shouldn't have to be that much concerns about whether people "stop developing for" a particular rendering engine. Also, can Mozilla yank someone's license for Gecko? Isn't it open source? Why should people stop using Webkit?
There are a few real reasons that Microsoft isn't using one of the existing open source rendering engines:
it would be acknowledging the validity and value of open source software
having a dominant but incompatible browser has provided them with the advantage of increased vendor lock-in
They have a lot of customers with old web apps that want/need to maintain backwards compatibility (which is the flip-side of the vendor lock-in)
I don't even think Apple's success is about UI guidelines. I mean, sure, they help, but Apple seems to have a... I don't know... what's the opposite of "tin ear"? Anyway, they just have a very good sense of design. Not just UI design like "graphic design", but engineering a product, like figuring out which features to include and how those features should work.
I've always thought that one of the interesting differences in design approach that Apple uses is that they don't throw in the kitchen sink right away. Some people hate them for it and feel like their products aren't feature-rich enough, but it really seems to work. They just start with a basic product that basically does one thing simply and well, but might not yet have all the features you want. Then their next release of that product adds a few features, but very carefully integrated in to the existing feature set. The next version adds some more in the same way. What you very rarely hear as a criticism about Apple's products is, "this feature feels tacked-on". You might hear, "It doesn't hear every feature you might want," but it's usually followed by, "but if you only want the features it has, it will do those things well."
Microsoft, for example, has in the past had the exact opposite design philosophy. It used to be that version 1 or 2 of their products had pretty much every major feature they're ever going to have, but none of it was actually usable until version 3. It's only then that Microsoft seems to focus on making those features work well together.
Your missing the point. Someone has to be responsible for their property.
No, you're missing the point. Society needs to be able to assign responsibilities to actions (and sometimes inaction, in the case of negligence). People do not necessarily need to be responsible for inanimate objects.
Are you only reading what you want to read and ignoring the rest? I already stated that with my examples of giving the car to an unlicensed or intoxicated driver or knowing the car would be used in the commission of a crime. I didn't say always, I said could be.
Right, it's "could be" and not "always" because people are not necessarily responsible for events that involve their property. They can be responsible regardless ownership. Ownership is not a particularly determinant factor in most cases.
So yes, I could be held responsible for handing over the keys to a drunk person, knowing that they're going to drive. Whether I own the car they're going to drive is irrelevant. The question is whether I was negligent in permitting or encouraging a drunk person to drive.
No, I'm trying to make the point that "someone" has to be responsible for what ever happens to it.
Yes, except that it's not the case that someone has to be legally responsible for all things that happen anyway. In lawsuits, there's often an attempt to establish who is responsible because that's what lawsuits are about. However, there are cases where no one is determined to be responsible, which (depending on the circumstances) may then be called "an act of God".
If an event is caused by human action, however, you still have to establish some kind of negligence or bad act. For example, if we got into a car accident with each other, it is possible that neither driver was negligent and so neither is held responsible for the damage and injuries resulting from the accident.
But again, that whole discussion isn't really relevant to the question. You're saying you need some kind of legal construct to limit the liability owners have over the actions of the companies they own. And that's fine, I have no objection to that. But why does that legal construct need to create artificial "persons" who are granted an inalienable right to have financial influence over our government officials?
The only way a corporation can shield non acting owners is by acting on it's own as a separate person.
Right, and you're trying to use this statement to prove itself, which is begging the question.
Without input on how something will effect corporations or corporations having the ability to influence politics, then it's entirely possible for the political environment to drive the corporations out of business.
Given a particular business, a restaurant, let's say, it's possible that disallowing the restaurant from having rat feces in their food will drive them out of business. They'll have to spend extra money on exterminating the rats in their kitchen, which it may not be able to afford. Where will you buy your food? If companies go out of business, not only will people lose their jobs, but the economy will suffer.
It's also possible that their inability to own slaves hurts our economy. Businesses have to pay more for labor, and they just pass those costs onto consumers. If it drives the prices too high, it will drive those businesses under.
So yeah, I'm thinking, "So?" The freedom of speech is not considered inalienable so that people can become more profitable.
What if the flying-camera-drone catches some police abuse on civilians, or some other egregious violation of human or civil rights? Do we, as civilians, have the right to request the footage of that incident at that time?
I would wonder if we had the right to request the footage even if there was no such violation. As you said, taxpayers paid for the thing, and the whole argument as to why the government should be allowed to use these sorts of things always boils down to, "Well you're outside, so you have no expectation of privacy. And besides, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide!"
If there's really nothing to hide and no expectation of privacy, then shouldn't we all be given the footage to analyze to our heart's content? If such a thing were allowed, would the same people support it?
What if no one is in the car and you left it out of gear
In that case, *you* left it out of gear, which is negligent.
And yes, you can be charged with manslaughter for letting someone else drive your car in certain situations
Only if you're negligent in some way, and not simply because you're technically the owner of the car.
If you know the neighbor was going to use the bat to hit the ball through the window, yes, you could be liable. But I think your missing the point in these.
First of all, I can't imagine that holding up. Maybe if I provide the baseball bat to my neighbor specifically for the purpose of breaking the window, but just knowing he's going to be reckless doesn't put me on the hook. The fact of my owning the baseball doesn't make me any more responsible than if I didn't own the baseball.
I think you're the one missing the point. You're trying to claim that owning something makes you responsible for whatever happens with it, and it simply doesn't. So that line of reasoning is debunked.
If you remove the separate person aspect of a corporation, then you remove the limits to obligations of the owners just as if the business was a partnership instead of a corporation.
This is more circular begging the question. Assuming that you need to limit the obligations and liabilities of owners, and assuming the only way to achieve that is to have corporations which are legally considered a "separate person" from the owner, then yes, we need each corporation to be considered "a person". If we don't assume what we're trying to argue from the outset, then the whole argument falls apart.
And what none of this answers is, even if you want to have some way in which a corporation is technically/legally considered a "person", what is harmed by having it only be a "person" in a limited sense, and not granting it the right to contribute to political campaigns? That was the original question, after all.
If the car runs over someone or something with that tire, it's the owner of the car, not the car that has the tires who is the responsible party.
No, if a car runs over someone or something, the person driving the car is the responsible party, and not the guy who owns it. Unless you're claiming that I can be charged for manslaughter if I lend my car to a friend and that person runs someone else over.
Or take another example: I lend the neighbor a baseball and a baseball bat. The neighbor then uses that equipment and ends up hitting the ball through a window. Am I liable because I own the equipment, or is the neighbor liable for choosing to play baseball right next to someone's house?
If someone is directing the company in a way inconsistent with it's best interest and caused a loss in value, then that person can be held accountable for those losses.
Oh, so first it was just any random guy who caused someone to lose an investment in any way, and that person could be sued. Then it was an owner. Then it doesn't matter who the actors are. And now it's someone directing the company? And... someone could sue the person who directs some company if that company causes someone to lose an investment somewhere?
Take Enron for instance, the directors of the company acted in bad faith by falsifying reporting, accounting, and squandering corporate funding causing harm to the company. They faced both civil and criminal liability for their actions. If you remove the separation from a corporation, then your actions extend to the same effect just as it would if the company was a partnership.
So who am I in this situation? The directors? Great, so I'm facing civil and criminal liability? Or am I supposed to be the owner?
Look, I understand the purpose of corporations is to limit the liability of the owners of the company, if that's the only point you're trying to make. That still doesn't make a corporation a person, nor is it a good reason to make a corporation a person legally.
Your actions then have an impact on other people's investments and you are required to act in good faith with a degree of loyalty.
But only insofar as I'm directing the company? I assume that if I'm essentially a silent partner, there are no laws against me advocating something in my private life that might run contrary to promoting the value of the company I'm invested in?
But if it's only insofar as I'm directing the company, shouldn't I be expected to act in good faith?
Anyway, that question doesn't really matter to the question at hand: why should a corporation be considered a "person"?
The corporations are already smothering the cities and other profitable areas.
Unfortunately, they're not exactly "smothering" us. I live in NYC, and the fastest upload rate I can get is 512kbps, unless I want to pay to have a T1 run to my apartment. Yeah, that's much better than dialup, but it's hardly "smothering" us with fast Internet. Technically they're offering FIOS in NYC, but generally you can't get it, and they've put a halt on rolling it out "until the economy gets better".
So my point here is that all the arguments about population density and whatnot are BS. These companies just don't have a motivation to invest in upgrades because there isn't real competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Two months after the house was foreclosed they put it back on the market for about 1 year's worth of payments. It's been on the market for nearly a year now.
Had they simply let me continue making payments they would have already made more than the price they're selling the house for. I'd love to just go pay for the house with cash they sent me, but it's been vandalized since and much of the $$$ was spent on purchasing and moving to a new house.
Yeah, this is the most disturbing thing to me is that it doesn't genuinely benefit anyone. You lost your house. The bank that owned your mortgage made less money out of the deal. Your neighbors probably lost value in their homes by having a cheap, vandalized, vacant house next door. Probably some of all of our tax dollars are going to end up covering the losses one way or another.
I've heard other similar stories, even some where the house becomes so heavily vandalized that the bank decides not to bother to sell it anymore and essentially abandons ownership. Why not just work out some kind of a deal with the occupant?
Secure-FTP (over SSL) is not sufficient as it only encrypts things without verifying the authenticity of the host you are connecting to.
Well what really does verify the authenticity of the host you're connecting to? SFTP doesn't really, it only verifies that the host you're connecting to is the same as the host you connected to before. SSL CAs sort of do, but most of them don't really work that hard to verify who they're giving certs to.
Probably the same reason why they don't go ahead and replace their CLI environment with some standard-ish Unix shell (e.g. bash) even though it would be a much better solution than their current command line. It's Not-Invented-Here and would increase interoperability, thereby decreasing vendor lock-in. Even if they do implement it, they'll make some weird incompatible implementation with patented "improvements".
Haven't you been paying attention?
... and don't forget "lobbying the government to give you subsidies and preferential treatment." Apparently capitalism doesn't work without that.
Well first, that's a good argument to make sure you don't have a keylogger, but not an argument against encrypting authentication while operating over an insecure network. Really, it's not a whacky or complicated idea. Unencrypted authentication is vulnerable to more types of attacks than encrypted authentication.
But just to argue the point, SFTP can be set up so that a keylogger alone won't get your login credentials. You can use public key authentication instead of a password. Now sure, public key authentication is potentially vulnerable to another sort of attack (someone with local access under your local account can simply copy the private key), but if you just want to talk about keyloggers....
It really should just go away. There's no excuse for using a protocol on the web that includes unencrypted authentication. If you have to set up additional tunneling of one protocol through another protocol just to ensure secure authentication, then your first protocol isn't really doing its job. FTP is simple? I guess, but it stinks. Even today, even using passive mode, you sometimes see weird/stupid problems with FTP going through firewalls and VPN tunnels.
People really should be using SFTP, but it's suffered from some other problems. For one, there hasn't traditionally been any easy/standard way to jail users once they log in. OpenSSH has recently included jailing functionality, but it still requires that users home directories are read-only and owned by root. Second, FTP clients all default to using FTP, and users who are just barely computer literate enough to put in hostname/username/password are put off by having to alter any other settings.
Yeah, keylogging and phishing are a weakness of passwords. All passwords. Strong or not.
It's not that strong passwords aren't as good as we thought. It's that all passwords fail to secure things when the attacker knows the password.
if you look at the root of all religions ... you will note that they are attempts to explain that which was, at the time, unexplainable or simply unacceptable
I wouldn't quite say that.. If you look at the root of all superstitions, you'll find that they're attempts to explain what was unexplainable at the time. If you look at the roots of organized religion, you will note that they are attempts by one set of people to control others.
The "organized" part of organized religion is really not too far different from the politics we see every day. Religions may teach true things in much the same way that politicians may make valid arguments. Leaders generally use a mix of common beliefs, valid viewpoints, good philosophical argumentation, superstition, logical fallacies, and psychological tactics to convince people what they should or should not do. Those leaders may have good intentions or bad intentions, and they may be right to convince people of those things or they may be wrong.
Right. The Roman Catholic Church hasn't exactly pro-science throughout its history, but it does has a long tradition of actually studying things, using actual philosophy and theology to try to understand their own religion and the world, rather than trying to impose a simple and strict literal interpretation of the Bible.
One of the weird benefits of centralized authority and papal infallibility has been that it's allowed the church to reinterpret dogma to some degree to keep up with the times. It ends up being a little like the Constitution allowing amendments-- changes can be made without being considered a violation of the original set of rules.
Of course the funny thing is how many Catholics basically don't give a shit what the Pope says, and just believe whatever it is that they believe.
I've got to say this: belief in fictional, mythological spirits can only be damaging to serious discussions about any subject area.
I'm sure many religious people would agree. Of course, they just wouldn't agree that their particular god(s) "fictional".
I think anytime people begin a discussion with their beliefs already determined and a mind closed to thinking in different ways, where the intent is to force others to believe what you believe without any attempt to understand the others' viewpoints, it's going to be an unproductive discussion.
That sort of thing can be caused by religion, but it can be caused by a lot of other things too.
The majority of European scientists used to agree that the earth was flat
Not even that. The greeks knew the Earth was round and had calculated its size pretty accurately. Since then, there hasn't been serious disagreement among scientists or sailors or educated people generally. There may have been some denial from the religious and the simply ignorant, but the story you hear about Columbus being the one who proved the world was round --or whatever the story is-- it's BS.
But the point was that the ball couldn't be held responsible.
No one was arguing that the ball would be held responsible. You were arguing that the owner of the ball is responsible for any damage the ball causes, which obviously is not true. And you agreed. So we're done there.
No, the owner of the car will be liable.
Even according to you, only if the owner was negligent in permitting someone else to drive their car. So we're done there.
No, both the owner and the negligent person is responsible in that situation.
You said, "if I was working for a company, and the situation came about as you described, then when you found out I was over worked and tired driving the car, you could sue the company because they had a duty to ensure I was a safe driver in an appropriate condition to drive". So is the company absolved of responsibility if they don't technically own the car I was driving? If not, then it's further evidence that responsibility doesn't go to the owner of an object, but rather it's the responsibility of those people who were negligent or reckless. So we're done there.
No, no, no. Public welfare does not trump the rights of a business.
No, no, no, no. The point is businesses don't have a "right" to be profitable. Your claim as to why businesses needed to be granted the right to free speech was that otherwise some particular business might not be as profitable. As they have no right to be profitable, I don't see why the need to be profitable demands that they be granted special additional rights.
No where in the constitution does it say it only applies to people in the literal sense
Nowhere does it say that special rights should be granted to non-persons for the sake of profit. Doesn't even imply such a thing.
You've held throughout this argument that a business are inherently the same sort of thing as cars, but we need to grant them "personhood" merely because it's beneficial to those businesses. Should we establish that it would be in the best interest of a car to be considered a "person", is it necessary that we also give cars the freedom of speech? Why not, since the Constitution is silent on the subject? Nowhere does it say, "cars aren't people".
Ok, first of all, no one is granted rights, no one has rights reserved.
Well rights certainly are granted to corporations. Most definitely they are. Corporations are artificial entities with no inherent or God-given rights. And how are rights not reserved for people? I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word "reserve", or are unfamiliar with at least one of its meanings.
But let me spell this out one more fucking time and pay attention this time.
Oh, please do!
The law works by making someone responsible for actions
Right! Actions. That's what I said.
When you remove this aspect of a separate person, you then dump liability onto the owners
Right, back to begging the question, i.e. it would be impossible to limit a person's liability in owning a company without making that company a separate person because only making it a separate person can limit liability. Check.
This screws with it's fiduciary duty of the company and could ruin some of them.
Right, this is bad for companies, and companies have an inalienable constitutional right to profit at the expense of the public welfare.
You most likely depend on a corporation for your job if you are not living in mom's basement and mowing lawns for pizza and mountain dew cash.
Great, a new weird circular argument. Building a system which concentrates economic and political power into corporations is good, and the evidence for this is that corporations currentl
It's one thing to say, "We made $X in the last year," and another to break down that $X to say exactly how much came from each song, how much came from iTunes and how much came from WalMart, and describe exactly where all those numbers came from.
You simply cannot assign blame to an object. This isn't third grade and the ball didn't hurt you, the person who threw it did.
Exactly! The person who threw it, not the person who owns it.
In some states, simply leaving the keys in a reasonably accessible place can make you liable.
Again, yes! The person who leaves the keys in an accessible place, and not the person who owns the car.
In those cases, the owners take responsibility for their own properties and suffer the loss.
It's not that they "take responsibility" and therefore suffer the loss. The loss is already suffered. It's just that, since no one in particular is responsible, no one else is liable to compensate the owner for his loss.
Actually, that is impossible in reality. It might have happened where no one driver is found to of been at fault because of lack of evidence
Erm...?! It's impossible that no one is legally at fault, and yet it might be found that no driver is at fault. Ok.
when you found out I was over worked and tired driving the car, you could sue the company because they had a duty to ensure I was a safe driver in an appropriate condition to drive
Ok, so yet another example where it isn't the owner of property who is responsible, but instead the negligent party that caused the event. Are you trying to make my argument for me?
the right of the public health trumps the right of the business
Exactly my point. That some business might not be as profitable does not trump the public welfare.
this country was founded on the idea of freedom of enterprise
Well it was founded on the idea of maintaining liberty for its citizens, which is utterly irrelevant to the discussion here. The preservation of individual freedom of speech (for a *person*) is vital to the purpose of our government, but guaranteeing profitability of a company is not.
You keep talking about all these various issues (most of which you're wrong about), but you're generally not really addressing the question of why corporations should be granted rights normally reserved for people. As far as I can remember, the only relevant argument you've made this whole time seems to boil down to "lessing the ability of corporations to influence our government might lessen their profitability, which might, in turn, harm our economy." However, that takes for granted the idea that their current level of influence is both acceptable and necessary.
Yeah, I think you're hitting on a point that a lot of people get wrong. People get all wrapped up in the idea, "Well without copyright, musicians won't be able to get paid enough, and no one will make music anymore!" Of course that's not true. People are pretty musical all on their own. They made music before copyright, and people still make music even when they aren't getting paid. I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that we could go as far as to outlaw all composition, playing, or recording of music, and there would still be lots of people willing to risk life and limb in breaking those laws.
So really, that's just not the issue.
Look at the history of the copyright, and you'll find that the main concern was not to ensure a business model whereby creative people or publishers would be ensured a highly profitable business. The big idea was more to ensure that the creative folk got a fair cut of whatever profits were to be had.
It has nothing to do with the downloader needing any rights.
So if the downloader doesn't need rights, then I'm allowed to download whatever software or movies or music I want, so long as I'm not distributing them?
Well, if you're running a commercial airline and you allow the aeronautical engineers to design the interior of the aircraft (including seats, lighting, fixtures) without including anyone with interior design experience, then yes, that might be a problem. If you allow the aeronautical engineers to design the menu for the inflight meals without consulting any kind of chef or caterer, then that might be a problem too.
they'd be up a creek without a paddle if they used Webkit and people stopped developing for it or licensed Gecko from Firefox and they went under or yanked Microsoft's license.
Well for one thing, if it adheres to standards, there shouldn't have to be that much concerns about whether people "stop developing for" a particular rendering engine. Also, can Mozilla yank someone's license for Gecko? Isn't it open source? Why should people stop using Webkit?
There are a few real reasons that Microsoft isn't using one of the existing open source rendering engines:
I don't know if I trust this guy with my interweb tubes, though. Did you notice the mess of cables behind him?
If we can't trust him to keep his wiring closet organized, how can we trust him to clean the tubes?
I don't even think Apple's success is about UI guidelines. I mean, sure, they help, but Apple seems to have a... I don't know... what's the opposite of "tin ear"? Anyway, they just have a very good sense of design. Not just UI design like "graphic design", but engineering a product, like figuring out which features to include and how those features should work.
I've always thought that one of the interesting differences in design approach that Apple uses is that they don't throw in the kitchen sink right away. Some people hate them for it and feel like their products aren't feature-rich enough, but it really seems to work. They just start with a basic product that basically does one thing simply and well, but might not yet have all the features you want. Then their next release of that product adds a few features, but very carefully integrated in to the existing feature set. The next version adds some more in the same way. What you very rarely hear as a criticism about Apple's products is, "this feature feels tacked-on". You might hear, "It doesn't hear every feature you might want," but it's usually followed by, "but if you only want the features it has, it will do those things well."
Microsoft, for example, has in the past had the exact opposite design philosophy. It used to be that version 1 or 2 of their products had pretty much every major feature they're ever going to have, but none of it was actually usable until version 3. It's only then that Microsoft seems to focus on making those features work well together.
Your missing the point. Someone has to be responsible for their property.
No, you're missing the point. Society needs to be able to assign responsibilities to actions (and sometimes inaction, in the case of negligence). People do not necessarily need to be responsible for inanimate objects.
Are you only reading what you want to read and ignoring the rest? I already stated that with my examples of giving the car to an unlicensed or intoxicated driver or knowing the car would be used in the commission of a crime. I didn't say always, I said could be.
Right, it's "could be" and not "always" because people are not necessarily responsible for events that involve their property. They can be responsible regardless ownership. Ownership is not a particularly determinant factor in most cases.
So yes, I could be held responsible for handing over the keys to a drunk person, knowing that they're going to drive. Whether I own the car they're going to drive is irrelevant. The question is whether I was negligent in permitting or encouraging a drunk person to drive.
No, I'm trying to make the point that "someone" has to be responsible for what ever happens to it.
Yes, except that it's not the case that someone has to be legally responsible for all things that happen anyway. In lawsuits, there's often an attempt to establish who is responsible because that's what lawsuits are about. However, there are cases where no one is determined to be responsible, which (depending on the circumstances) may then be called "an act of God".
If an event is caused by human action, however, you still have to establish some kind of negligence or bad act. For example, if we got into a car accident with each other, it is possible that neither driver was negligent and so neither is held responsible for the damage and injuries resulting from the accident.
But again, that whole discussion isn't really relevant to the question. You're saying you need some kind of legal construct to limit the liability owners have over the actions of the companies they own. And that's fine, I have no objection to that. But why does that legal construct need to create artificial "persons" who are granted an inalienable right to have financial influence over our government officials?
The only way a corporation can shield non acting owners is by acting on it's own as a separate person.
Right, and you're trying to use this statement to prove itself, which is begging the question.
Without input on how something will effect corporations or corporations having the ability to influence politics, then it's entirely possible for the political environment to drive the corporations out of business.
Given a particular business, a restaurant, let's say, it's possible that disallowing the restaurant from having rat feces in their food will drive them out of business. They'll have to spend extra money on exterminating the rats in their kitchen, which it may not be able to afford. Where will you buy your food? If companies go out of business, not only will people lose their jobs, but the economy will suffer.
It's also possible that their inability to own slaves hurts our economy. Businesses have to pay more for labor, and they just pass those costs onto consumers. If it drives the prices too high, it will drive those businesses under.
So yeah, I'm thinking, "So?" The freedom of speech is not considered inalienable so that people can become more profitable.
What if the flying-camera-drone catches some police abuse on civilians, or some other egregious violation of human or civil rights? Do we, as civilians, have the right to request the footage of that incident at that time?
I would wonder if we had the right to request the footage even if there was no such violation. As you said, taxpayers paid for the thing, and the whole argument as to why the government should be allowed to use these sorts of things always boils down to, "Well you're outside, so you have no expectation of privacy. And besides, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide!"
If there's really nothing to hide and no expectation of privacy, then shouldn't we all be given the footage to analyze to our heart's content? If such a thing were allowed, would the same people support it?
What if no one is in the car and you left it out of gear
In that case, *you* left it out of gear, which is negligent.
And yes, you can be charged with manslaughter for letting someone else drive your car in certain situations
Only if you're negligent in some way, and not simply because you're technically the owner of the car.
If you know the neighbor was going to use the bat to hit the ball through the window, yes, you could be liable. But I think your missing the point in these.
First of all, I can't imagine that holding up. Maybe if I provide the baseball bat to my neighbor specifically for the purpose of breaking the window, but just knowing he's going to be reckless doesn't put me on the hook. The fact of my owning the baseball doesn't make me any more responsible than if I didn't own the baseball.
I think you're the one missing the point. You're trying to claim that owning something makes you responsible for whatever happens with it, and it simply doesn't. So that line of reasoning is debunked.
If you remove the separate person aspect of a corporation, then you remove the limits to obligations of the owners just as if the business was a partnership instead of a corporation.
This is more circular begging the question. Assuming that you need to limit the obligations and liabilities of owners, and assuming the only way to achieve that is to have corporations which are legally considered a "separate person" from the owner, then yes, we need each corporation to be considered "a person". If we don't assume what we're trying to argue from the outset, then the whole argument falls apart.
And what none of this answers is, even if you want to have some way in which a corporation is technically/legally considered a "person", what is harmed by having it only be a "person" in a limited sense, and not granting it the right to contribute to political campaigns? That was the original question, after all.
If the car runs over someone or something with that tire, it's the owner of the car, not the car that has the tires who is the responsible party.
No, if a car runs over someone or something, the person driving the car is the responsible party, and not the guy who owns it. Unless you're claiming that I can be charged for manslaughter if I lend my car to a friend and that person runs someone else over.
Or take another example: I lend the neighbor a baseball and a baseball bat. The neighbor then uses that equipment and ends up hitting the ball through a window. Am I liable because I own the equipment, or is the neighbor liable for choosing to play baseball right next to someone's house?
If someone is directing the company in a way inconsistent with it's best interest and caused a loss in value, then that person can be held accountable for those losses.
Oh, so first it was just any random guy who caused someone to lose an investment in any way, and that person could be sued. Then it was an owner. Then it doesn't matter who the actors are. And now it's someone directing the company? And... someone could sue the person who directs some company if that company causes someone to lose an investment somewhere?
Take Enron for instance, the directors of the company acted in bad faith by falsifying reporting, accounting, and squandering corporate funding causing harm to the company. They faced both civil and criminal liability for their actions. If you remove the separation from a corporation, then your actions extend to the same effect just as it would if the company was a partnership.
So who am I in this situation? The directors? Great, so I'm facing civil and criminal liability? Or am I supposed to be the owner?
Look, I understand the purpose of corporations is to limit the liability of the owners of the company, if that's the only point you're trying to make. That still doesn't make a corporation a person, nor is it a good reason to make a corporation a person legally.
Your actions then have an impact on other people's investments and you are required to act in good faith with a degree of loyalty.
But only insofar as I'm directing the company? I assume that if I'm essentially a silent partner, there are no laws against me advocating something in my private life that might run contrary to promoting the value of the company I'm invested in?
But if it's only insofar as I'm directing the company, shouldn't I be expected to act in good faith?
Anyway, that question doesn't really matter to the question at hand: why should a corporation be considered a "person"?
The corporations are already smothering the cities and other profitable areas.
Unfortunately, they're not exactly "smothering" us. I live in NYC, and the fastest upload rate I can get is 512kbps, unless I want to pay to have a T1 run to my apartment. Yeah, that's much better than dialup, but it's hardly "smothering" us with fast Internet. Technically they're offering FIOS in NYC, but generally you can't get it, and they've put a halt on rolling it out "until the economy gets better".
So my point here is that all the arguments about population density and whatnot are BS. These companies just don't have a motivation to invest in upgrades because there isn't real competition.