Google partnering with NASA is only a metaphor for searching the universe for information.
It's not meant literally as you can easily recognize from the fact that it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.
I'm not sure this will work as advertised. The judges were reluctant to split Microsoft the way AT&T was split and there seemed to be hints of political influence on the process that should not have existed. If this is possible in a public case like that it may be even less successful in less public cases.
We are also still talking about companies that break laws, not companies that avoid laws by leaving the country or that circumvent laws or "mere" moral obligations in any other way.
I don't think that your proposal works. Suspending all commercial activity is very difficult to define and most companies would effectively be forced to close by a long term suspension of their activities.
Also you missed the point of my proposal: Ethical policies would create a network of ethical rules above the demands of the law, not increase the weight of the law towards companies.
To follow through with your proposal you need to change the laws, to follow through with a system of ethical policies you just have to make the offer of this or a similar specification. While the education of customers with the goal to make them ask for ethical policies leads to some kind of democratic system it does not require the existing democratic system of the state at all and thus might ease the strain on this system a bit.
While you are right in saying that I didn't elaborate on the point I assume that governments
can only do so much about personal greed.
Personal greed can deteriorate ethics and elected governments can only stand in the way of personal greed until a majority elects a different government.
Globalization has taken away a further part of governmental control. If one government is in the way a globalized company can shift its headquarters to another country.
The solution is, in my opinion, to raise the ethics of the population in general. That starts with teaching the
Categorical Imperative and that continues with
offering people a choice of ethical policies they can uphold in their everyday decision making process.
> get your government to abandon the crazy rule that exempts companies from blame
You are right but it's difficult to abandon a rule that isn't officially a rule, merely a side effect of circumstances.
Companies are driven by the desire for personal gain of their shareholders. Shareholders are quite often only interested in making money, not in exercising responsible control of their company shares. This is especially true for mutual funds.
What government can do when personal greed dictates the rules is limited, because personal greed can also sway an election.
In my opinion you need to force companies to publish ethics and adhere to these ethics. That demand has to come from as many people as possible, including but not limited to shareholders. To do this a navigable system of ethical policies seems helpful. I'm currently trying to design a recommendation for such a system:
Ethics Search Protocol (ESP) for Internet Search Engines.
> I'm not saying that's a good thing but that's how the system works.
If the system is broken you have to fix it, not stand around and tell everybody that being broken is the only state the system can have.
There are already chicken nuggets that taste much better than the orignial. The company that makes them is granovita
They are called "Soya Steakli" and are made of texturized soy chunks. With a vegan breadcrumb coating they beat any meat product I have tried.
Ethically they are obviously untainted, while chicken meat obviously is not.
If photoblogs are quickly becoming the next cool thing in the blog world, will my
electric monk need more memory or will I have to look at the pictures myself?
These are quite sound ethical ideas and directions but unfortunaly most of us are far from recognizing the need for ethical behaviour today. Even if you don't agree with me it has never been a good idea to call religious convictions 'crazy shit'.
Religion in a nutshell is: god is trying to teach us our own set of ethics. We've to invent them as we go along and separate the good from the bad, just as Buddha has tought his pupils.
We're bad pupils because even if we come up with some ethics we ignore them and forget about them only a generation later. That's really poor.
One of the more important subtopic of ethics today would be environmental ethics.
The specification will be tightly coupled to the Java language, the reference implementation will probably use a generated web services interface in XML-RPC or SOAP and be portable to other lanuages.
I like your idea of a 100% economy. The idea to know you have 100% of your share is nice but I can't imagine a way to calculate the buying power in a %-economy. How many %% is a bag of potatoes?
Is that true of all bags of the same weight? Are all potatoes equal?
This is a proposal to specify alternate units of exchange as part of the Java language and to use the class java.util.Currency as the unit of exchange, as one might expect to do.
A complementary currency could be any unit of exchange you can think of, not necessarily an hour.
Another unit of exchange would be, for example, the terra: A currency based on a basket of commodities.
Yet another currency could be e-Gold or any of the
local currencies circulated in the USA today:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/cur_grps.html
The IRS has issued three local rulings that Time Dollars are tax exempt. They have given three reasons for this status.
1. An hour is always an hour, regardless of what is offered
2. They are backed only by a moral obligation and are not legally binding
3. Their purpose is charitable.
The IRS has issued three local rulings that Time Dollars are tax exempt. They have given three reasons for this status.
1. An hour is always an hour, regardless of what is offered
2. They are backed only by a moral obligation and are not legally binding
3. Their purpose is charitable.
The sole modification of java.util.Currency, if it is what the expert group decides on, may be a perfectly reasonable outcome of this JSR. Small is beautiful. If there's no need to change more than a single class then don't, I can agree with that.
The specification will just be a set of Java classes to provide a convenient framework for the implementation of complementary currencies in Java.
The reference implementation to that specification might use XML, web services, encrypted XML and even try to use all this in a cross-platform kind of way, which even seems impossible to avoid, once XML is in the game.
If you want to see a reference implementation (RI) in other languages than Java I'll be glad to help in any way possible but I'm very much Java-centric these days. You never forget to program in C, at least as a Java programmer you don't, but my C++ is just C with classes in it and I don't use any other programming language anymore.
If the web service interface of the RI can be used to automatically generate stubs for other languages I'll be happy to provide these.
The JSR is a specification for an addition and a modification to the Java language. Of course you can add a java library to the system which replaces java.util.Currency but that would certainly cause a lot of problems. I much prefer to let Sun know we need a more complex 'Currency' class with CurrencyProviders, CurrencyRegistries and CurrencyDescriptions and have that system as a part of the core language, or, at least, the required modification of java.util.Currency and the rest of it as part of a JSR package (e.g.: javax.trade.cc)
Slashdot Mirror
The download is here.
The european green party is also releasing a linux CD: Linux for all and www.gruene-opensource.net
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.
We are also still talking about companies that break laws, not companies that avoid laws by leaving the country or that circumvent laws or "mere" moral obligations in any other way.
Also you missed the point of my proposal: Ethical policies would create a network of ethical rules above the demands of the law, not increase the weight of the law towards companies.
To follow through with your proposal you need to change the laws, to follow through with a system of ethical policies you just have to make the offer of this or a similar specification. While the education of customers with the goal to make them ask for ethical policies leads to some kind of democratic system it does not require the existing democratic system of the state at all and thus might ease the strain on this system a bit.
Personal greed can deteriorate ethics and elected governments can only stand in the way of personal greed until a majority elects a different government.
Globalization has taken away a further part of governmental control. If one government is in the way a globalized company can shift its headquarters to another country.
The solution is, in my opinion, to raise the ethics of the population in general. That starts with teaching the Categorical Imperative and that continues with offering people a choice of ethical policies they can uphold in their everyday decision making process.
I elaborate on this topic in my posting: Okay, blame companies - but do it intelligently
You are right but it's difficult to abandon a rule that isn't officially a rule, merely a side effect of circumstances.
Companies are driven by the desire for personal gain of their shareholders. Shareholders are quite often only interested in making money, not in exercising responsible control of their company shares. This is especially true for mutual funds.
What government can do when personal greed dictates the rules is limited, because personal greed can also sway an election.
In my opinion you need to force companies to publish ethics and adhere to these ethics. That demand has to come from as many people as possible, including but not limited to shareholders. To do this a navigable system of ethical policies seems helpful. I'm currently trying to design a recommendation for such a system: Ethics Search Protocol (ESP) for Internet Search Engines.
> I'm not saying that's a good thing but that's how the system works. If the system is broken you have to fix it, not stand around and tell everybody that being broken is the only state the system can have.
AltGr ist the right alt key on some keyboards that need to distinguish left and right alt for typing.
There are already chicken nuggets that taste much better than the orignial. The company that makes them is granovita They are called "Soya Steakli" and are made of texturized soy chunks. With a vegan breadcrumb coating they beat any meat product I have tried. Ethically they are obviously untainted, while chicken meat obviously is not.
http://www.spread.org/. By the way: How complex is a message queue? That sounds like kindergarden technology to me.
If photoblogs are quickly becoming the next cool thing in the blog world, will my electric monk need more memory or will I have to look at the pictures myself?
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/math/
You may also want to take a look at:
http://math.nist.gov/jnt/
http://www.vni.com/products/imsl/jmsl.html
http://www.mathtools.net/Java/Libraries/
Religion in a nutshell is: god is trying to teach us our own set of ethics. We've to invent them as we go along and separate the good from the bad, just as Buddha has tought his pupils.
We're bad pupils because even if we come up with some ethics we ignore them and forget about them only a generation later. That's really poor.
One of the more important subtopic of ethics today would be environmental ethics.
I like your idea of a 100% economy. The idea to know you have 100% of your share is nice but I can't imagine a way to calculate the buying power in a %-economy. How many %% is a bag of potatoes? Is that true of all bags of the same weight? Are all potatoes equal?
The web service descriptions will probably be sufficient to reimplement protocols by just running stub generators.
This is a proposal to specify alternate units of exchange as part of the Java language and to use the class java.util.Currency as the unit of exchange, as one might expect to do. A complementary currency could be any unit of exchange you can think of, not necessarily an hour. Another unit of exchange would be, for example, the terra: A currency based on a basket of commodities. Yet another currency could be e-Gold or any of the local currencies circulated in the USA today: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/cur_grps.html
Okay, here is all the documentation you want:
The IRS has issued three local rulings that Time Dollars are tax exempt. They have given three reasons for this status.
1. An hour is always an hour, regardless of what is offered
2. They are backed only by a moral obligation and are not legally binding
3. Their purpose is charitable.
http://www.timedollar.org/td_irs_rulings.htm
http://www.futureofmoneysummit.com/terra-project.p hp
The proposal was made by Bernd Lietaer, one of the architects of the Euro and a strong advocate for complementary currencies.
1. An hour is always an hour, regardless of what is offered
2. They are backed only by a moral obligation and are not legally binding
3. Their purpose is charitable.
http://www.timedollar.org/td_irs_rulings.htm
Of course, the reference implementation (RI) will aim to be compatible with GCC/GCJ.
The sole modification of java.util.Currency, if it is what the expert group decides on, may be a perfectly reasonable outcome of this JSR. Small is beautiful. If there's no need to change more than a single class then don't, I can agree with that.
The reference implementation to that specification might use XML, web services, encrypted XML and even try to use all this in a cross-platform kind of way, which even seems impossible to avoid, once XML is in the game.
If you want to see a reference implementation (RI) in other languages than Java I'll be glad to help in any way possible but I'm very much Java-centric these days. You never forget to program in C, at least as a Java programmer you don't, but my C++ is just C with classes in it and I don't use any other programming language anymore.
If the web service interface of the RI can be used to automatically generate stubs for other languages I'll be happy to provide these.
It is only fair for slashdot to link my story if I link to their site, isn't it?
The JSR is a specification for an addition and a modification to the Java language. Of course you can add a java library to the system which replaces java.util.Currency but that would certainly cause a lot of problems. I much prefer to let Sun know we need a more complex 'Currency' class with CurrencyProviders, CurrencyRegistries and CurrencyDescriptions and have that system as a part of the core language, or, at least, the required modification of java.util.Currency and the rest of it as part of a JSR package (e.g.: javax.trade.cc)