Well, still, using embryonic cells is pretty sick, unethical
I guess you're not an organ donor, either, huh? And, if you were dying of, say, liver cancer, you'd turn down a chance to live our your life with a donated organ? Why? Because it's "sick" to use something that's beyond the use of a dead body?
We sure wouldn't want people living longer, healthier, more productive lives if it means burying someone with a pound less of their internal tissue, now would we?
Now, normally I'd stop right there, presumingi that no one could be so obtuse as to not see how this is exactly the same situation as the stem cells from an about-to-be-discarded surplus IVF blastocyst, or the recovered cells from a failed fetus, or the recovered cells from a pregnancy that was aborted, and was going to be aborted anyway. People like you, that would rather use that tissue for fertalizer in a landfill than save some poor brain-injured kid's life are (well, to use your words) "sick" and "unethical" to a nauseating degree.
So, they propose collecting a tax from French citizens to offset the income that musicians and their businesses will lose once there's no limit on freely distributing those musicians' works. So, where do you supposed the French government will send the checks to British, or American, or Italian musicians? Will the National Symphony Orchestra in DC be getting some of their income, now, from French taxpayers who only like listening to Eurotrash Disco Remixes? Will urban Parisians have to subisdize the production of Morroccan ex-patriate class-warfare Islamo-rap?
Right, as if fundamental computer networking technology wouldn't have been created through voluntary means anyway.
Well, Mr. Coward, I'm not really going to take the bait you're offering, but you do need to bone up on things a bit. Whether or not a lot of universities would have found their own funding to get together and string up a standards-based internetworking environment as decentralized as the DoD required is an interesting question. But it's academic, because it was the DoD's defense tech needs that got the ball rolling. But (in the context of the actual thread, here... you do actually understand context, right?) the question is whether or not regulatory issues come up when the networks maintained by so many companies start to be used in lieu of traditional telcos. Get a grip.
RIP freedom of speech (9/17/1787 - 9/11/2001). You will be sadly missed
There have been successful and unsuccessful libel suits between parties before, during, and after 1787. You're still free to speak, but as always you are also subject to libel laws. Just like someone else is subject to them if they libel you, and you pursue it. Can you think of no circumstance, personally or professionally, when a completely false something that someone publishes about you would be worth stopping? Your ability to speak, and your right not to be libeled are each important.
Watching, in essence, is 'copying the content to your brain'. Trying to make something uncopyable, yet readable/watchable, is like trying to make water not wet.
The very best effort I can make to tell you about the latest episode of Deadwood on HBO cannot, ever, replace actually watching it. There's no means by which I can transfer my experience of that entertainment over to you. In fact, that's the whole point... they produce something really good, and I really enjoy my experience watching it, and when I try to explain it to you, the real message is: "you should get HBO, too." Handing you a bit-wise copy of the show does not give you an incentive to subscribe, and thus through your subscription, help them to pay the people that make that show so great.
Exactly. The effects of 'piracy' in the US are miniscule
I'll see your exactly and raise you another one. The reason the impact in the states is less than overseas (I don't know about "miniscule"... that probably depends on where you sit) is that we do have recourse in the US, and the government isn't seeing piracy of foreign material as just another tax vector. If we had no copyright protection in the US, it would be the end of the type of work we're talking about.
I keep hearing that, yet the industry keeps pumping out high-budget movies. Should I assume, then, that the rate of piracy isn't really very bad?
My comment was in response to someone that wants to abolish copyrights. Bad as piracy is, at least the filmaker, or author, or musician actually does have recourse when someone deliberately, flagrantly rips them off. If I can't copyright my $100M film, what's stopping someone from making copies and selling them for $0.10 each in Taiwan (oh, well, that's already happening, but you get my drift).
Even the old belief that airwaves are limited and should be regulated is bunk. Interference from large broadcasters is a myth. Ever wonder how your house can have 3 cell phones, 3 cordless phones and 15 wireless accessories work together?
Wow, man - are you even listening to yourself? The airwaves are limited, by the laws of physics. If we both broadcast on the same frequency, some device somewhere is going to be seeing each of our signals at an equal, and equally useless strength. Why can I be typing this message through Wi-Fi in my house, watching AIM on my mobile phone next to me, and knowing that my wireless house phone will still work, even when I'm microwaving my soup for lunch? Exactly because there are regs and legal recourse when people screw with what makes all of that work. Do you REALLY want the guy next door deciding that it's OK by him if he puts up a megawatt transmitter that happens to step exactly on all of those devices' carriers?
The telephone company is dead -- as WiFi or faster wireless bandwidth is made available
Well, I suppose that depends on what the meaning if "is" is (heh!). Since I talked to my mom on her copper land line this morning, I'm thinking it's not actually dead. And since I talked to my mother-in-law, in rural Virginia, just the other day... you know, in an area that's too mountainous for any line-of-site carrier, and where cable-based broadband is years away, and DSL won't go the distance... the "telephone company" isn't dead there, either. It's the only thing that DOES work, or will work for a long time.
If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them?
So what? There are people with lots of money that would love vanity moments like that. You know, people like George Soros who are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to impact elections... he'd LOVE to blanket all of downtown NY, even for a few minutes, with a signal no one could escape. Or, what about someone who doesn't care about paying the electric bill? You know, one-last-gasp type idealogical or vandal broadcasting?
Can a government "of the People, by the People and for the People" go against the People any long?
You wouldn't be referring to the government that actually created the 'net in the first place, would you? You know, as a defense research project? You make "the internet" sound like it actually exists as single thing. It's not. It's a bunch of individual, corporate, insitutional, government, and foreign networks all communicating with each other - a network of networks. If municipal governments are supposed to start trusting VoIP for 911 calls, etc, then they are going to expect a certain amount of predictability and interopability in the way that some of the those networks talk to each other. If that can't be established, then they'll just continue to expect "the telephone company" to take care of it for them, and enforce that through the large regulatory burdens that those companies carry.
DRM? Go for it, big producers. I'm finding new forms of entertainment every day, and it doesn't come in a pretty package and it isn't advertised by beautiful people.
You do seem to forget that billions of people actually like pretty packages and beautiful people, and that's why they pirate the work in those forms, performed by those beautiful people. Some people even take on projects that they can only afford to produce if they know that they can sell their work for actual, spendable money. People who deliberately seek out bar bands, dinner theater actors, and street magicians for their entertainment always have been able to, and always will be able to. People who want to see what someone with the budget for a cast of thousands, exotic locations, thousands of CGI processors chugging away, etc., aren't going to go away. But the people producing works like that can't do so if everything they do is ripped off. That doesn't matter to you, because you don't like that sort of entertainment. Which, is fine, since the people you do like aren't worried about the cash flow anyway, and even if you do buy media from such people, they probably wouldn't want to stamp their data as rights-managed, lest they offend you and their other fan.
You have implicit responsibilities to your shareholders and they are codified in law, not just in your specific contracts.
I trust you still get my point: certainly there are non- or low-profit circumstances. But the vast majority of privately held companies operating on investment from others are absolutely committed to performing well, financially, for everyone involved. Whether or not they are legally or contractually obliged to doesn't change my observation that the act of going public isn't suddenly the moment when (and not before), magically, the people running the company are suddenly profit-driven and interested in rewarding their investors' good faith.
You mean, you are embarrassed by the larger number of people that voted for their preferred representatives than voted for whomever you would have preferred in a given seat in Congress, the Senate, or the White House.
I don't see them representing me at any point in the past few years
Possibly because you couldn't talk enough people into seeing things your way? Elected officials are elected by the people that vote for them. Beyond that, they act according to their own ideals.
I have signed a petition for his impeachment and charged with crimes against the American people.
Your use of the language isn't very helpful, here, so I'll have to assume you meant that part of your petition is hoping to somehow bring about criminal charges? Petitions cannot perform that role. I think you mean that you are hoping other people will stamp their feet and demand that - but you must know that no petition can play that role.
We, the people are are supposed to be the controlling interest in the country.
Right. And we do that by voting. And sometimes, your vote is in the minority, and the person you want running things and having to make military and security decisions isn't the person who gets the job. Just like a lot of people were horrified when Jimmy Carter got the job.
We live in a republic. Elected representatives go forth and act on our behalf. You are not consulted on each and every action that is taken. For example, when Democratic reps (like Rockefeller) were briefed on these taps as they were being requested and approved, they didn't check with you either. The country couldn't function if every decision was a town meeting. That doesn't even work at PTA meetings, let alone while trying to prevent people from killing thousands of people.
Fair and equal partners in the great exercise called democrasy
Presuming you mean "democracy," you do have a fair and equal role to play. You vote, right? You use your voice to convince other people that, say, John Kerry would never approve of trying to prevent domestic terror attacks, thus making sure we're safer, right?
If you are as embarrassed as I am.
Well, I am embarassed, but only by your short-sightedness. I will be especially interested to hear your take on this when someone here in the states is shown to be, along with foreign supporters and funds, complicit in the next large-scale attack our country has to weather.
We're talking about the president's illegal domestic wiretaps here, not his legal foreign wiretaps
The whole issue here is that these are taps that do involve foreign communications. The other end of those foreign communications is here in the US. Communications with foreigners, overseas, is a foreign wiretap. The fact that a specific person/group that is already a known affiliate of, for example, Al Queda, is the local end of that phone call, is what brings the intel people to ask for authorization to find out whether those two parties are having another round of calls like the ones that organized the 9/11 attacks.
Once they became a publicly traded company, they then had one responsibility. To maximize shareholder's wealth.
Why do people assume that this is true of publicly held companies, but not true of pre-public companies working off of venture capital and private investment (even, Mom's cash)? When someone gives you a more modest pile of cash to help grow (or prevent the early demise of) a start-up company, you are already working to make that investment worth it (unless you want to lose your investors). Whether you're dealing with friends and family investing, or public shareholders, you'd better be doing your best to honor those investors' faith in you.
many of the loonies you cite are left leaning loonies. We're really not afraid of them
But, the very worst of the local laws and crazy behavior in my state (The People's Republic Of Maryland) is driven by a long tradition of socialist-ish sentiment. That orientation would have died a long time ago if it weren't for the fact that the local economy (and thus, the tax base that allows for such craziness) is always humming, given the local federal government activity. I can't stand the evangelical crowd, myself, but the "legislation of values" that most gets in my way, personally, is stuff that comes in from the leftier side of the spectrum - no question about it. Limits on speech, limits on commerce, confiscation of property, sky-high local taxes, insufferable political correctness in the school system... even, in my county, X hours of mandatory "community service" (you know, the same thing that's used in misdemeanor sentencing!) as a condition of graduating high school. My point is that most of the crazy-right stuff gets shot down in court, but most of the crazy-left stuff doesn't. The Kansas Board of Ed stuff will go away out of sheer embarassment at some point (just like their counterparts in PA all got the boot in the recent election). I'd rather solve it that way, myself - it's feels a lot more authentic, if you know what I mean.
Sometimes it makes me wish we'd let the South win the civil war. They could live in backward redneck-land and the rest of the country could get on with evolving the species.
Outstanding! One is rarely treated to such a display of irony: a sweeping, uninformed, all-inclusive condemnation of a huge swath of the country, contending that they, what... are losers because they make sweeping, uninformed judgements about things?
I don't suppose you've met any of the loony hardcore Catholics from New England? Or perhaps some Mormons from the upper-Rockies area? Or maybe some urban Baptists from, say, Philadelphia? Or perhaps some addled-brained Wiccan Nitwits from Seattle? Or maybe some Orthodox Jews from downtown NY,NY? There are people with retro-silly sensibilities all over this country, and always have been. New England is still infested with Puritans. No amount of MTV or porn spam seems to cure it.
On the other hand, I've met some of the most literate, gracious, science-informed, fundy-allergic, down-to-earth people in the world south of the Mason-Dixon Line. On balance, they're often considerably more rational and forward-thinking than some of the culture-rot-population I've met lurking in a lot of the northern cities. I'm just as tired of urbane, metrosexual pseudo-intellectuals who think that hydrogen is a new energy source being hidden by the government as you are of the hillbilly that thinks he's been abducted by aliens because he drank too much cough syrup.
It'd be like a company deciding to lock out Saab drivers, on the grounds that more of their customers drive Chevys. Fine for Billy Bob's Rib Bar, less fine for Belgian Cotton Sheets R Us.
Hey, I drive a Chevy and like nice sheets you insensitive clod!
I do get your point, though. But a decision to not develop content for Mac users, while stupid (especially for someone like Boo.com, as you say) is still deliberate, I think. Not out of an informed dislike for that customer/visitor, but out of a no-doubt misguided notion about the best way to spend the IT/marketing dollars or project lifecycle man hours.
but who wants to order from a company that doesn't allow you as a customer
You mean, like retailers that don't take your Discover Card? Some businesses - even big ones - don't invest in every option that every potential customer might want to use... and for big companies, those are usually very deliberate choices. Doesn't mean they won't get around to it, but it's not usually because they don't know how (technically), it's usually because they ran out of time to produce a totally cross-platform site, and had to go live to correspond with scads of other marketing initiatives (print materials, TV ads, credit incentives, magazine layouts, employee training, vendor shipments, etc). Might be the tail wagging the dog, but it happens all the time with all sorts of things - we're only talking about browsers on Macs because we're here on slashdot. If you were in the retail finance/accounting circles, you'd be talking about Gap's choices of card acceptance, or job listing technologies, or shipment tracking EDI legacy technology compatibility.
While it would be nice to live in a world where people didn't abuse things like wikipedia that just isn't going to happen
In that regard, it's a perfect model of larger society. Vandals, terrorists, and just plain twits are a tiny minority, but can rob the whole system of its value. The only option is a trade-off, and eternal vigilance is the cost. And by that, I don't mean that everyone about whom an article is written should have to spend every Sunday mopping up after idiots.
I would think more an AI-assist sort of arrangement. Say a relatively new eBay account does a fair number of buying and selling of smallish items. Great. But as soon as an auction of theirs comes along with an immediately higher pace of bidding, a much higher lowest bid, or a shorter auction duration than their recent history... that's when a human would get an alert to cast eyeballs on the auction and do a sanity/smell test.
I would imagine that Google would be exceedingly good at this sort of thing, since they're very good at ranking and pattern detection. gBay will be a killer.
Re:But Wikipedia does NOT organize the world's inf
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Yes, as everyone knows, Britannica is written by robots, and therefore completely free of any possibility of opinions or bias.
The whole point of an editorial board is to establish some consistency in the orientation of the publication. Just like the NY Times is flamingly left-wing, or the Wall Street Journal is all about business interests - Britannica has a posture which is well known, and plain as day. This as opposed to WP, where the choice of material, tone of the writing, and variations on the facts are driven by whoever shows up on that particular day.
But Wikipedia does NOT organize the world's info..
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Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and Wikipedia fits that goal better than Google Groups does.
WP might be better than Google Groups, but it certainly doesn't contribute to an organization of the "world's information." Rather, it's an organization of certain people's opinions about a handful of people, events, popular culture (yes, and some actual dry facts, too) etc., and a handful of people's spin on how to present it (or outright lie about it, depending on what time of day it is). "Organizing the world's information" suggests a certain amount of credibility, not the often-politically-tinged or outright loony stuff that rattles in and out of various state of quantum actualness on Wikipedia. Now, if Google bought the OED, or the Britannica, then we'd have something to chat about. Plus, I'd be willing to look at (and click on) AdSense ads in exchange for a regular romp through the OED. Yum... 2-page word definitions!
After all, isn't internet access the fastest and cheapest form of communicating?
No, I don't think the internet's the cheapest form of communication. Sitting across the coffee table talking to someone is the cheapest. Well, and fastest, too, as far as that goes. Using the internet to do the same thing - even if you ARE using a $100 laptop - only works if your country has billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, training, and souped-up techno-culture in place to make it all go. Solid power grids, not-too-corrupt entities watching over things, etc.
In the poorest parts of the world, lack of basic rule of law is the biggest thing in the way of growth-by-information-flow. If you can't assume that invested money/time/resources are going to retain their value (or work at all) over the long haul, then no fancy networked anything will get built, at least not at reasonable prices.
A "normal" encyclopedia might give a brief mention. With Wikipedia, I can learn a lot about something, and then visit some links to learn more
We don't disagree - and I often use it that way, too. My point isn't to debate the utility of that, it's to debate the utility of comparing WP to a traditional encyclopedia format, and especially to do so and then pretend that errors-per-word stats are a meaningful indicator of WP's quality vs. something else. It's apples v. oranges, that's all.
But much of the extra length in the WP articles is often more commentator-ish, or blocks of material containing links, etc. Things that more traditional encyclopedias wouldn't want to include. And a lot of lengthier WP articles tend to get repititive, or have summaries and details that come close to being mutally unnecessary. Not a bad thing, just a different thing. Saying that WP articles are longer, and thus represent a lower real error rate is pretty misleading, I think. It's not the length of your article, it's how you use it.
But in the oil industry, the price goes up and down and every customer pays the same ammount
But that's just simply not true. Big refineries pay less than small ones. Big distributors pay less than small ones. Smart retailers that commit to longer-term contracts pay less than those living more hand-to-mouth. Prices paid at every level of the oil (and every other commodity) market and distribution chain fluxuate wildly, and the long-term viability and business flow of each player can impact what they pay. Just like Google rewards long-time customers, long-lived established (and relevent) sites, etc.
While not illegal this does not justify a claim of "NOT EVIL"
How is evaluating your customers and striking deals that seem appropriate, according to your own interests, evil? It's not like Google (or search, or advertising in general) is some natural resource or government service that Google is on the hook to spread around evenly in some utopian socialist model... they're a private sector company deliverying a service in a way, and according to methods that they have established. If you think it's Eeeeevil for them to evaluate their customers, looking at the big picture, then all you have to do is spend your money somewhere else. They have competition: Overture, MS, Yahoo, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, still, using embryonic cells is pretty sick, unethical
I guess you're not an organ donor, either, huh? And, if you were dying of, say, liver cancer, you'd turn down a chance to live our your life with a donated organ? Why? Because it's "sick" to use something that's beyond the use of a dead body?
We sure wouldn't want people living longer, healthier, more productive lives if it means burying someone with a pound less of their internal tissue, now would we?
Now, normally I'd stop right there, presumingi that no one could be so obtuse as to not see how this is exactly the same situation as the stem cells from an about-to-be-discarded surplus IVF blastocyst, or the recovered cells from a failed fetus, or the recovered cells from a pregnancy that was aborted, and was going to be aborted anyway. People like you, that would rather use that tissue for fertalizer in a landfill than save some poor brain-injured kid's life are (well, to use your words) "sick" and "unethical" to a nauseating degree.
So, they propose collecting a tax from French citizens to offset the income that musicians and their businesses will lose once there's no limit on freely distributing those musicians' works. So, where do you supposed the French government will send the checks to British, or American, or Italian musicians? Will the National Symphony Orchestra in DC be getting some of their income, now, from French taxpayers who only like listening to Eurotrash Disco Remixes? Will urban Parisians have to subisdize the production of Morroccan ex-patriate class-warfare Islamo-rap?
Right, as if fundamental computer networking technology wouldn't have been created through voluntary means anyway.
Well, Mr. Coward, I'm not really going to take the bait you're offering, but you do need to bone up on things a bit. Whether or not a lot of universities would have found their own funding to get together and string up a standards-based internetworking environment as decentralized as the DoD required is an interesting question. But it's academic, because it was the DoD's defense tech needs that got the ball rolling. But (in the context of the actual thread, here... you do actually understand context, right?) the question is whether or not regulatory issues come up when the networks maintained by so many companies start to be used in lieu of traditional telcos. Get a grip.
RIP freedom of speech (9/17/1787 - 9/11/2001). You will be sadly missed
There have been successful and unsuccessful libel suits between parties before, during, and after 1787. You're still free to speak, but as always you are also subject to libel laws. Just like someone else is subject to them if they libel you, and you pursue it. Can you think of no circumstance, personally or professionally, when a completely false something that someone publishes about you would be worth stopping? Your ability to speak, and your right not to be libeled are each important.
Watching, in essence, is 'copying the content to your brain'. Trying to make something uncopyable, yet readable/watchable, is like trying to make water not wet.
The very best effort I can make to tell you about the latest episode of Deadwood on HBO cannot, ever, replace actually watching it. There's no means by which I can transfer my experience of that entertainment over to you. In fact, that's the whole point... they produce something really good, and I really enjoy my experience watching it, and when I try to explain it to you, the real message is: "you should get HBO, too." Handing you a bit-wise copy of the show does not give you an incentive to subscribe, and thus through your subscription, help them to pay the people that make that show so great.
Exactly. The effects of 'piracy' in the US are miniscule
I'll see your exactly and raise you another one. The reason the impact in the states is less than overseas (I don't know about "miniscule"... that probably depends on where you sit) is that we do have recourse in the US, and the government isn't seeing piracy of foreign material as just another tax vector. If we had no copyright protection in the US, it would be the end of the type of work we're talking about.
I keep hearing that, yet the industry keeps pumping out high-budget movies. Should I assume, then, that the rate of piracy isn't really very bad?
My comment was in response to someone that wants to abolish copyrights. Bad as piracy is, at least the filmaker, or author, or musician actually does have recourse when someone deliberately, flagrantly rips them off. If I can't copyright my $100M film, what's stopping someone from making copies and selling them for $0.10 each in Taiwan (oh, well, that's already happening, but you get my drift).
Even the old belief that airwaves are limited and should be regulated is bunk. Interference from large broadcasters is a myth. Ever wonder how your house can have 3 cell phones, 3 cordless phones and 15 wireless accessories work together?
Wow, man - are you even listening to yourself? The airwaves are limited, by the laws of physics. If we both broadcast on the same frequency, some device somewhere is going to be seeing each of our signals at an equal, and equally useless strength. Why can I be typing this message through Wi-Fi in my house, watching AIM on my mobile phone next to me, and knowing that my wireless house phone will still work, even when I'm microwaving my soup for lunch? Exactly because there are regs and legal recourse when people screw with what makes all of that work. Do you REALLY want the guy next door deciding that it's OK by him if he puts up a megawatt transmitter that happens to step exactly on all of those devices' carriers?
The telephone company is dead -- as WiFi or faster wireless bandwidth is made available
Well, I suppose that depends on what the meaning if "is" is (heh!). Since I talked to my mom on her copper land line this morning, I'm thinking it's not actually dead. And since I talked to my mother-in-law, in rural Virginia, just the other day... you know, in an area that's too mountainous for any line-of-site carrier, and where cable-based broadband is years away, and DSL won't go the distance... the "telephone company" isn't dead there, either. It's the only thing that DOES work, or will work for a long time.
If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them?
So what? There are people with lots of money that would love vanity moments like that. You know, people like George Soros who are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to impact elections... he'd LOVE to blanket all of downtown NY, even for a few minutes, with a signal no one could escape. Or, what about someone who doesn't care about paying the electric bill? You know, one-last-gasp type idealogical or vandal broadcasting?
Can a government "of the People, by the People and for the People" go against the People any long?
You wouldn't be referring to the government that actually created the 'net in the first place, would you? You know, as a defense research project? You make "the internet" sound like it actually exists as single thing. It's not. It's a bunch of individual, corporate, insitutional, government, and foreign networks all communicating with each other - a network of networks. If municipal governments are supposed to start trusting VoIP for 911 calls, etc, then they are going to expect a certain amount of predictability and interopability in the way that some of the those networks talk to each other. If that can't be established, then they'll just continue to expect "the telephone company" to take care of it for them, and enforce that through the large regulatory burdens that those companies carry.
DRM? Go for it, big producers. I'm finding new forms of entertainment every day, and it doesn't come in a pretty package and it isn't advertised by beautiful people.
You do seem to forget that billions of people actually like pretty packages and beautiful people, and that's why they pirate the work in those forms, performed by those beautiful people. Some people even take on projects that they can only afford to produce if they know that they can sell their work for actual, spendable money. People who deliberately seek out bar bands, dinner theater actors, and street magicians for their entertainment always have been able to, and always will be able to. People who want to see what someone with the budget for a cast of thousands, exotic locations, thousands of CGI processors chugging away, etc., aren't going to go away. But the people producing works like that can't do so if everything they do is ripped off. That doesn't matter to you, because you don't like that sort of entertainment. Which, is fine, since the people you do like aren't worried about the cash flow anyway, and even if you do buy media from such people, they probably wouldn't want to stamp their data as rights-managed, lest they offend you and their other fan.
You have implicit responsibilities to your shareholders and they are codified in law, not just in your specific contracts.
I trust you still get my point: certainly there are non- or low-profit circumstances. But the vast majority of privately held companies operating on investment from others are absolutely committed to performing well, financially, for everyone involved. Whether or not they are legally or contractually obliged to doesn't change my observation that the act of going public isn't suddenly the moment when (and not before), magically, the people running the company are suddenly profit-driven and interested in rewarding their investors' good faith.
I am embarrassed by the government
You mean, you are embarrassed by the larger number of people that voted for their preferred representatives than voted for whomever you would have preferred in a given seat in Congress, the Senate, or the White House.
I don't see them representing me at any point in the past few years
Possibly because you couldn't talk enough people into seeing things your way? Elected officials are elected by the people that vote for them. Beyond that, they act according to their own ideals.
I have signed a petition for his impeachment and charged with crimes against the American people.
Your use of the language isn't very helpful, here, so I'll have to assume you meant that part of your petition is hoping to somehow bring about criminal charges? Petitions cannot perform that role. I think you mean that you are hoping other people will stamp their feet and demand that - but you must know that no petition can play that role.
We, the people are are supposed to be the controlling interest in the country.
Right. And we do that by voting. And sometimes, your vote is in the minority, and the person you want running things and having to make military and security decisions isn't the person who gets the job. Just like a lot of people were horrified when Jimmy Carter got the job.
We live in a republic. Elected representatives go forth and act on our behalf. You are not consulted on each and every action that is taken. For example, when Democratic reps (like Rockefeller) were briefed on these taps as they were being requested and approved, they didn't check with you either. The country couldn't function if every decision was a town meeting. That doesn't even work at PTA meetings, let alone while trying to prevent people from killing thousands of people.
Fair and equal partners in the great exercise called democrasy
Presuming you mean "democracy," you do have a fair and equal role to play. You vote, right? You use your voice to convince other people that, say, John Kerry would never approve of trying to prevent domestic terror attacks, thus making sure we're safer, right?
If you are as embarrassed as I am.
Well, I am embarassed, but only by your short-sightedness. I will be especially interested to hear your take on this when someone here in the states is shown to be, along with foreign supporters and funds, complicit in the next large-scale attack our country has to weather.
We're talking about the president's illegal domestic wiretaps here, not his legal foreign wiretaps
The whole issue here is that these are taps that do involve foreign communications. The other end of those foreign communications is here in the US. Communications with foreigners, overseas, is a foreign wiretap. The fact that a specific person/group that is already a known affiliate of, for example, Al Queda, is the local end of that phone call, is what brings the intel people to ask for authorization to find out whether those two parties are having another round of calls like the ones that organized the 9/11 attacks.
Once they became a publicly traded company, they then had one responsibility. To maximize shareholder's wealth.
Why do people assume that this is true of publicly held companies, but not true of pre-public companies working off of venture capital and private investment (even, Mom's cash)? When someone gives you a more modest pile of cash to help grow (or prevent the early demise of) a start-up company, you are already working to make that investment worth it (unless you want to lose your investors). Whether you're dealing with friends and family investing, or public shareholders, you'd better be doing your best to honor those investors' faith in you.
many of the loonies you cite are left leaning loonies. We're really not afraid of them
But, the very worst of the local laws and crazy behavior in my state (The People's Republic Of Maryland) is driven by a long tradition of socialist-ish sentiment. That orientation would have died a long time ago if it weren't for the fact that the local economy (and thus, the tax base that allows for such craziness) is always humming, given the local federal government activity. I can't stand the evangelical crowd, myself, but the "legislation of values" that most gets in my way, personally, is stuff that comes in from the leftier side of the spectrum - no question about it. Limits on speech, limits on commerce, confiscation of property, sky-high local taxes, insufferable political correctness in the school system... even, in my county, X hours of mandatory "community service" (you know, the same thing that's used in misdemeanor sentencing!) as a condition of graduating high school. My point is that most of the crazy-right stuff gets shot down in court, but most of the crazy-left stuff doesn't. The Kansas Board of Ed stuff will go away out of sheer embarassment at some point (just like their counterparts in PA all got the boot in the recent election). I'd rather solve it that way, myself - it's feels a lot more authentic, if you know what I mean.
Sometimes it makes me wish we'd let the South win the civil war. They could live in backward redneck-land and the rest of the country could get on with evolving the species.
Outstanding! One is rarely treated to such a display of irony: a sweeping, uninformed, all-inclusive condemnation of a huge swath of the country, contending that they, what... are losers because they make sweeping, uninformed judgements about things?
I don't suppose you've met any of the loony hardcore Catholics from New England? Or perhaps some Mormons from the upper-Rockies area? Or maybe some urban Baptists from, say, Philadelphia? Or perhaps some addled-brained Wiccan Nitwits from Seattle? Or maybe some Orthodox Jews from downtown NY,NY? There are people with retro-silly sensibilities all over this country, and always have been. New England is still infested with Puritans. No amount of MTV or porn spam seems to cure it.
On the other hand, I've met some of the most literate, gracious, science-informed, fundy-allergic, down-to-earth people in the world south of the Mason-Dixon Line. On balance, they're often considerably more rational and forward-thinking than some of the culture-rot-population I've met lurking in a lot of the northern cities. I'm just as tired of urbane, metrosexual pseudo-intellectuals who think that hydrogen is a new energy source being hidden by the government as you are of the hillbilly that thinks he's been abducted by aliens because he drank too much cough syrup.
It'd be like a company deciding to lock out Saab drivers, on the grounds that more of their customers drive Chevys. Fine for Billy Bob's Rib Bar, less fine for Belgian Cotton Sheets R Us.
Hey, I drive a Chevy and like nice sheets you insensitive clod!
I do get your point, though. But a decision to not develop content for Mac users, while stupid (especially for someone like Boo.com, as you say) is still deliberate, I think. Not out of an informed dislike for that customer/visitor, but out of a no-doubt misguided notion about the best way to spend the IT/marketing dollars or project lifecycle man hours.
but who wants to order from a company that doesn't allow you as a customer
You mean, like retailers that don't take your Discover Card? Some businesses - even big ones - don't invest in every option that every potential customer might want to use... and for big companies, those are usually very deliberate choices. Doesn't mean they won't get around to it, but it's not usually because they don't know how (technically), it's usually because they ran out of time to produce a totally cross-platform site, and had to go live to correspond with scads of other marketing initiatives (print materials, TV ads, credit incentives, magazine layouts, employee training, vendor shipments, etc). Might be the tail wagging the dog, but it happens all the time with all sorts of things - we're only talking about browsers on Macs because we're here on slashdot. If you were in the retail finance/accounting circles, you'd be talking about Gap's choices of card acceptance, or job listing technologies, or shipment tracking EDI legacy technology compatibility.
While it would be nice to live in a world where people didn't abuse things like wikipedia that just isn't going to happen
In that regard, it's a perfect model of larger society. Vandals, terrorists, and just plain twits are a tiny minority, but can rob the whole system of its value. The only option is a trade-off, and eternal vigilance is the cost. And by that, I don't mean that everyone about whom an article is written should have to spend every Sunday mopping up after idiots.
AI really help solve the problem?
I would think more an AI-assist sort of arrangement. Say a relatively new eBay account does a fair number of buying and selling of smallish items. Great. But as soon as an auction of theirs comes along with an immediately higher pace of bidding, a much higher lowest bid, or a shorter auction duration than their recent history... that's when a human would get an alert to cast eyeballs on the auction and do a sanity/smell test.
I would imagine that Google would be exceedingly good at this sort of thing, since they're very good at ranking and pattern detection. gBay will be a killer.
Yes, as everyone knows, Britannica is written by robots, and therefore completely free of any possibility of opinions or bias.
The whole point of an editorial board is to establish some consistency in the orientation of the publication. Just like the NY Times is flamingly left-wing, or the Wall Street Journal is all about business interests - Britannica has a posture which is well known, and plain as day. This as opposed to WP, where the choice of material, tone of the writing, and variations on the facts are driven by whoever shows up on that particular day.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and Wikipedia fits that goal better than Google Groups does.
WP might be better than Google Groups, but it certainly doesn't contribute to an organization of the "world's information." Rather, it's an organization of certain people's opinions about a handful of people, events, popular culture (yes, and some actual dry facts, too) etc., and a handful of people's spin on how to present it (or outright lie about it, depending on what time of day it is). "Organizing the world's information" suggests a certain amount of credibility, not the often-politically-tinged or outright loony stuff that rattles in and out of various state of quantum actualness on Wikipedia. Now, if Google bought the OED, or the Britannica, then we'd have something to chat about. Plus, I'd be willing to look at (and click on) AdSense ads in exchange for a regular romp through the OED. Yum... 2-page word definitions!
After all, isn't internet access the fastest and cheapest form of communicating?
No, I don't think the internet's the cheapest form of communication. Sitting across the coffee table talking to someone is the cheapest. Well, and fastest, too, as far as that goes. Using the internet to do the same thing - even if you ARE using a $100 laptop - only works if your country has billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, training, and souped-up techno-culture in place to make it all go. Solid power grids, not-too-corrupt entities watching over things, etc.
In the poorest parts of the world, lack of basic rule of law is the biggest thing in the way of growth-by-information-flow. If you can't assume that invested money/time/resources are going to retain their value (or work at all) over the long haul, then no fancy networked anything will get built, at least not at reasonable prices.
A "normal" encyclopedia might give a brief mention. With Wikipedia, I can learn a lot about something, and then visit some links to learn more
We don't disagree - and I often use it that way, too. My point isn't to debate the utility of that, it's to debate the utility of comparing WP to a traditional encyclopedia format, and especially to do so and then pretend that errors-per-word stats are a meaningful indicator of WP's quality vs. something else. It's apples v. oranges, that's all.
But much of the extra length in the WP articles is often more commentator-ish, or blocks of material containing links, etc. Things that more traditional encyclopedias wouldn't want to include. And a lot of lengthier WP articles tend to get repititive, or have summaries and details that come close to being mutally unnecessary. Not a bad thing, just a different thing. Saying that WP articles are longer, and thus represent a lower real error rate is pretty misleading, I think. It's not the length of your article, it's how you use it.
But in the oil industry, the price goes up and down and every customer pays the same ammount
But that's just simply not true. Big refineries pay less than small ones. Big distributors pay less than small ones. Smart retailers that commit to longer-term contracts pay less than those living more hand-to-mouth. Prices paid at every level of the oil (and every other commodity) market and distribution chain fluxuate wildly, and the long-term viability and business flow of each player can impact what they pay. Just like Google rewards long-time customers, long-lived established (and relevent) sites, etc.
While not illegal this does not justify a claim of "NOT EVIL"
How is evaluating your customers and striking deals that seem appropriate, according to your own interests, evil? It's not like Google (or search, or advertising in general) is some natural resource or government service that Google is on the hook to spread around evenly in some utopian socialist model... they're a private sector company deliverying a service in a way, and according to methods that they have established. If you think it's Eeeeevil for them to evaluate their customers, looking at the big picture, then all you have to do is spend your money somewhere else. They have competition: Overture, MS, Yahoo, etc.