Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
It doesn't matter. There is no justification for killing another person, no matter much you hate them or they hate you.
It has nothing to do with whether or how much I "hate" them. It has everything to do with whether they are willing, able, motivated, and unswayable from their plans to kill me, or you, or my family, or anyone else for that matter.
Rather than bothering with hypotheticals, let's just take a regularly recurring actual example. Let's say that a guy living in Iraq is sick and tired of left-over Baathists and out-of-town Syrians/Jordanians/Saudis armed with Iranian- and Korean-made weapons trying their level best (by capriciously killing Iraqis) to prevent democracy from taking root in his country and the region. Let's say that he's aware of a house on the outskirts of Baghdad in and out which he's seen insurgents moving the night before. So, he tells a local member of the Iraqi armed forces what he knows. That guy moves the info up the chain of command, and local US intel finds out about it. So one of the Predator drones that's humming along quietly above that zone turns its imaging hardware on the house in question, and sure enough, there's a crew of armed guys loading mortars and a launcher into the bed of a pickup truck.
The predator follows them as they make their way a mile or two to a schoolyard where they set up the mortar and prepare to launch rounds a thousand yards or so to the east, right into a market where people are setting up to buy and sell produce.
So... what would you do? You've got mere moments before the people in question use an innaccurate weapon to indiscriminately kill people who are buying groceries just because they hope that doing so will instill a sense of terror in a population that has elections coming up. The clock's ticking... they're loading a mortar round into the tube, right now. Were you planning on getting on the phone and sending the local hight school Conflict Mediation Specialist to the schoolyard to discuss the insurgent's feelings, and see if maybe there are some after school basketball games or something would calm their urge to kill anyone who think democracy is a worthy pursuit?
The local Al Queda franchise operator, Al Zarqawi, has repeatedly indicated to his local team that "democracy is evil and un-Islamic" and that anyone who supports it should be killed. And of course, he's killed many, many people - including crowds of children gathering around police and soldiers to say hello, police cadets lining up to learn how to secure their towns, and so on. To say nothing of mortaring marketplaces, which brings us back to the ticking clock, and your little philosophical problem.
Your problem is that if you do nothing, innocent people are about to die, without question, and very shortly. Possibly dozens of them. Because you say there is never any justification for killing the three guys with the mortar rig, you are condemning mothers, kids, and vegetable merchants to being shredded where they stand. Or, you can use the incredibly precise technology at your disposal, and use the Predator's onboard tools to remove those three guys and their weapons from the face of the planet. Right now, before they kill people in the marketplace.
So, your philosophy would result in the deaths of dozens (and of course, if such attacks go completely unchecked, a never ending stream of more such), whereas my philosophy would result in three dead insurgents, and a marketplace full of people that will be able to go about their lives, including the act of voting for their own representatives - the very thing that the insurgents want to stop. I find your willingness to stand idly by and be a spectator to the death of innocents to be morally repugnant.
By the way - if I had the ability to stop, with a bullet, a career terrorist from blowing up a restaurant where you and your friends and family were sitting down over a meal, would you consider it more noble and appropriate for you and your family to die (alon
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for... instead of killing each other?
Each other? It only takes one party, if you know what I mean.
If you hadn't noticed, most of the killing going on is person-to-person murder. The killing to which we (the US and allies, as nations) are currently responding (lethally, as needed) is killing done by organizations that are organized around thuggo-/theo-cratic movements that don't think there are any unanswered questions, and that the very act of looking into such things is the heresy of infidels. When someone is really convinced on that subject, and is actually proud to blow you and your kids up in a restaurant, bus, or office tower - well, then yes, there starts to be an "each other" aspect to it. But to suggest that it's just some multi-dimensional hobby, which those of us disposed to hunting black holes could just stop if we felt like it... well, that's just not the csae.
You and I both want to spend more money hunting black holes, or learning how life evolves - but some cultures would rather neither they, nor we didn't, and are actually willing to kill people who consider those to be valid (and their-flavor-deity-insulting) pursuits. That's not a world view you can reason with, and when their more militant members go on a 70-virgin-fueled jaunt to rid the world of folks that don't see it their way, a certain amount of defensive violence starts to come into play. Happily, the military is one of the biggest investors in science and technology, so there's that, anyway.
No, sorry. The "don't care what businesses think" crowd shares a lot of members with the "Windoze is teh Suxx0r" crowd that can't understand why more people don't use Linux. When people use something every day at work, they're a lot more inclined to feel comfortable with it at home, sending picture of the kids to grandma, playing games, using eBay, etc. Wide adoption of non-MS stuff by large corporate users is a huge step towards making millions of people more comfortable with it at home. That will also showcase the various distros' shortcomings and add more fuel to the fire. Of course I realize that idiots who don't see the big picture and can't bring themselves to think two minutes into the future for a glimpse of it won't get it. But if pointing out reality helps even the occasional person get it, then my work here is done. Well, not really. But I've at least ranted ever so slightly less pointlessly into the howling winds of nerdly piousness and anti-pragmatism.
Look, if the don't-care-about-business-use-of-Linux(et al) people don't care, well... then they don't care! But the people that wish more users would adopt Linux have to care what businesses and business people think. You can't have it both ways.
How much less could he care? A lot less? So, since he could care less, that means that he does care more about the innocent in jail than he does about other things (though you're not saying which).
decisions of the UN as you like in your attempt to prove them unfit to control the root server
Hmmm... like having Iran heading up a UN disarmament conference? Or assigning Libya to chair the UN's Commission on Civil Rights? You know, the commission that found that Castro's Cuba (having just immediately executed three of them, and then sentencing 79 other people trying to flee that country to decades in prison) should, as punishment, "receive a UN envoy" so that they could apologize. Such bracing discipline! Such reinforcement of liberty! You know, liberty: the very thing that the internet (and its name servers) need in order to be worth a damn.
Or, you could just look at the UN's humiliating non-response (even verbally!) to the slaughter and systematic rape (of villages, figuratively, and women, literally) by Islamic militants in Sudan. No need for me to link to sources there, since presumably you watch the news once in a while.
Or, you could take the behavior of the General Secretary, Kofi Annan. When a UN high commissioner (Ruud Lubbers) was accused of sexually harassing a subordinate, an internal investigation was launched. That investigation found the woman's complaint to be legitimate, but Annan dismissed the result in order to avoid censuring the man involved. As with so many other cases, the administrative leadership in that organization will let miserable things happen to individuals and to entire countries in order to avoid upsetting delegations.
When an entity like the UN, dealing with an actual shooting-at-planes-every-week and ignore-the-post-invasion-of-Kuwait-treaty charmer like Saddam, allows a stunningly corrupt thing like the oil for food operation to both enrich both the person it's supposed to control and buy blocking votes in the security council... imagine what sort of influence peddling will go on over non-hostility-related operations like DNS?
Do you really think that China's (with its permanent position on the UN security council and considerable other powers) influence on such governance will be favorable to open and free communications, especially as it relates to human rights and democracy? The UN's decision to make a brutal totalitarian country like China a permanent SC member is exactly the sort of thing that suggests what a mistake it would be to give the UN any influence on the root of the net's name space. But in most cases, it's not the citable UN decisions that prove their craven and capricious nature - it's their lack of action on countless fronts, and unwillingness to actually recognize the corrupt nature of so many of the member countries that makes it so obvious. You want sexist? Look at the UN's unwillingness to call sexist regimes what they are. You want racist? Look at the UN's unwillingness to talk out loud about one race slaughtering another because of race, or to allow ethnic cleansing in villages right next door to UN peacekeeping emplacements in the Balkans. Expect the exact same (totally hollow) commitment to freedom and equality by any UN group that starts to get involved in the most important global communications system ever seen.
You know something's wrong when they have to bring Congress into this.
But that's exactly the way to preface a controversial and important action. You know, so that later, there won't be any whining. You know, like how Congress saw all the same intelligence, and then voted for the action in Afghanistan and Iraq. That way, no one can complain about it only being the executive branch that... oh, wait. Never mind, people will whine no matter what we (with or without congressional activity) do about DNS authority. Since we're going to hear it anyway, we might as well take the opportunity to solidify our position on the matter, and make sure that at least most of the pieces of the 'net that we care about continue to function. Without some UN sub-committee, chaired this week by the technical experts from The Sudan, deciding that Allah doesn't the ".com" TLD should be used by women, etc.
Well, I'm just glad that you can come here to 66.35.250.151 and post your comments! I mean, the 66.35.250.151 crowd will definitely know where you're coming from. I was about to wish you'd mentioned a couple of other web sites in your discussion of the non-naming of Japanese storms, but it's just as well, since we wouldn't want those sites to get 66.35.250.151'ed.
Only once a year? Nonsense!
on
Zombie Lurch
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· Score: 4, Funny
I live the Washington, DC area. Just head downtown on any given day and you'll see the local Zombie Lurch Chapter doing their finest. There's even a delegation from every state. It's a veritable Church Of the Zombie Lurch. Second only, perhaps, to the nearest Junior High School literature classroom.
I don't have time to worry about that. I'm all busy worrying about that dangerous, growing Greenland ice sheet. Just like they said in the 70's, that Ice Age is coming. Or is the other way around? It's almost like there's a short, shallow supply of contradictory evidence and a lot of overblown political blather on every side! Almost like that, anyway. Causality shmausality.
Because the people helping out with all of that interactive, positive-anecdote information on Exploding Growth Micro-Cap Stocks all seem so generous with their time, and their message boards are all so positive and upbeat. I always feel so good about the time I spend learning about my options.
more software patents. That will solve almost all legal woes with clear cut lines of IP ownership
Except that most of the suits in mid-sized tech companies I know are all about contracts, billing, employment, office space, ADA compliance, hiring/firing... that sort of thing. Which explains why the non-tech company number is almost as high. Every business is pecked to death by this crap.
What makes you think the high stakes criminals who get caught are the only ones there are?
Because the very nature of that sort of behavior leaves a huge wake behind it. You simply can't take millions of dollars from a company (or cause it to go elsewhere without benefit to the company) for long before the house of cards crashes down. That's exactly what happened at Enron and all of the other high-profile cases that smell the same. Sometimes, of course, we're just talking about stupid management, who make poor choices and nearly drive companies into the ground out of foolishness (ahem, HP), but that's what boards of directors and institutional investors are supposed to correct (i.e., HP). When there's lack of oversight, and you've got a particularly crafty person with a personal delusion about no one noticing the broken P&L statement, you get a train wreck like Enron. And you get people going to jail, obviously, as they should.
What makes you think they typically lose more in monetary penalties than they gained?
Um... reading the facts. When you see a Ken Lay or similar buffoon having all of his assets siezed, losing his house, cars, and every liquid thing they have or ever will have (because they'll owe legal fees forever, too), that about covers it. That doesn't pay back the investors who foolishly didn't review the books as well or as often as they should have, but you won't find too many people making that mistake going forward. And of course, there are draconian things like SarBox that actually have teeth.
What makes you think their prison terms are commensurate with the damage done by their crimes?
I don't know, really, how to evaluate that except on a case-by-case basis. Is running a company into the ground the same as rape? Or murder? Perhaps. Is investing in any businesses a risk? Sure... but being defrauded does tend to make one a smarter investor. I know that if I worked somewhere that ran its own internal 401, and all of the stock was in that company... I'd be getting the hell out, that's for sure. Ebbers, from WorldCom, got 25 years. For him, that's a life sentence. Good enough for you?
No, I'd say that your self image relies on convincing yourself that the only difference between you and someone who makes more money than you is corruption.
Except, I've worked for and with numerous small-, mid-, and big-sized operations. They are audited ruthlessly, and the bigger they are, the more transparent their bookeeping is (and legally, has to be). You are completely clouded by your idea of what a "CEO" is. The vast majority of the jobs, growth, innovation, productivity, and actual transactional business in this country is conducted by smaller businesses. Even companies with 10 employees have chief executives. Their "cronies" are usually their cousins or friends who have scraped together the money and sweat equity to start a business. Your demon-like fantasy bad guy running a business is the exception, not anything like the rule. Most people are decent human beings, and I know and support hundreds (who work with thousands) that don't put up with the poorly-imagined evil paper dolls that you suggest run most businesses.
Then again, I suppose you probably think that the X-Files was a documentary, too.
Now, about the injustice you think I tolerate. How many many hours do you suppose I've put into defending businesses from the technical pieces of account attacks, financial fraud, theft of every variety (inside, outside, in-transit, etc)... well, it's a career. Businesses, from small mom-and-pops up to larger organizations (including one of my more common types of customers: non-profit associations that process donations and other financial instruments, which, by-the-way, also have CEOs) are pummeled, day in, day out, with loss-inducing crapstorms from unethical people of every stripe - but most of them small-time (and lame) attempts from twits that think they won't get caught.
The cost to all of us, in the form of higher prices (because of lost services and merchandise, jacked up insurance rates, etc) and lost productivity is in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year. This type of loss - from both employees and outsiders - is enough to drive many businesses out of business, and is one of the reasons that many small businesses decide to merge and acquire each other, so that they can pool resources, and weather/prevent such losses through the type of focus that it's hard for smaller shops to handle. But the people that run and invest in those companies - who have everything to lose if they go under - are now operating under fantastically proctological beasts like Sarbanes-Oxley, the cost of which (of course) is just added to what we all pay. But in practice, the transparency in accounting under that act is pretty much impossible to avoid. And so what? The people investing their money in those businesses are the ones that insist on that sort of accountability anyway. That's why you get shareholder suits when management screws around with the books.
Your imaginary culture of mafia business people running the economy would be laughable if it weren't so commonly reinforced in popular entertainment (ironic, of course, since popular entertainment is itself generally presented by large business operations). The real echo-chamber for this nonsense, though, is the never-had-a-real-job and never-ran-a-business left-ish college student universe. They usually wake up when they're 30 or so, or when their best friend (crony, you say?) actually does start a business and they get to see what it's all actually about.
truth of the matter is that one almost has to be corrupt to get to that level in business
Being smart, hardworking, sometimes lucky, persuasive, and able to earn the trust of investors (including grandmothers re-aligning their 401k accounts) does not equal corruption. Thinking otherwise is a real injustice, because it's that perspective that causes a lot of people to spend at least a decade or so of their adult life operating on poisonous mixed premises and being bitter over the wrong things.
It's funny how we seem to get most upset when it's people who have almost nothing doing the scamming. Yet when rich folk do scamming, like the Savings & Loan scandal, Enron, Worldcom, and so on, people don't get so upset.
What the hell are you talking about? This is not insightful, this is class-baiting anti-business nonsense painting with a stupidly broad brush and getting the facts wrong (not that doing so ever stopped a good anti-business rant, of course). But let's say you're immune to all of the CEOs-Going-To-Jail media coverage. The reason "we" don't get so upset is because something is done about people like that. They lose their jobs, page huge (usually bankrupting) fines, and then give up their liberty as they go to actual prison. The billions and billions that are lost to petty scams, inside retail theft, check/credit fraud, identity theft... that stuff makes us mad because people are rarely caught. Profiles about people who do it are inflammatory for that very reason.
That's exactly his point. This isn't a cultural issue, this is just shady people trying to scam other potentially-shady people. That bit of the human psyche crosses borders just fine.
Why not? It's a no-brainer. The scams are ojectively wrong, by any rational view, period. That they are trying to scam people with a thin ethical shield doesn't make the scam somehow relatively OK. If the government did that, we'd call it entrapment.
These are people that are sitting around for hour in cyber cafes spamming. They're not begging in the street, or trying to grow just one more sweet potatoe in a dry field.
Never mind that your child could do. There are lots of things your child could do, but should not do.
Next thing you'll be saying that just because it's on a computer or a network, that the same general civilized ethics as used in the real world should still apply. Where's the moral relativism? Where's the it's-Tech-so-all-bets-are-off slashdottedness? Sorry, I guess I've read a few too many comments here that would excuse anything done by any kid as long as it can be connected, no matter how obliquely, to learning PHP or (for academic reasons, of course) testing rootkit deployments.
Thanks for using the word "integrity" outside of the foreign-key-in-a-database context.
Yes, but I think you'll find that it's the poor who do most of the work.
Really? Do you really think that's true? I live in a middle-middle class neighborhood. Everyone in that economic class are paying taxes, and pretty much every household as two, hard-working adults, with at least one person working grueling hours, or sometimes two jobs. Adjoining us is a neighborood comprized largely of subsidized housing. Driving past it, you see work-age adults sitting on front steps at all hours of the day and night, and these are typically households with many more children than in the households with busy working adults. How does that plug into your who-does-the-work, who-pays-the-taxes, and who-gets-the-entitlements statement?
The huge productivity of our economy revolves around the efficiencies that are generated by knowledge workers, high-tech enablers of growing businesses, and so on. Yes, somebody still gets paid to serve burgers and do landscaping, but there's a reason those are considered entry-level jobs. Regardless, those are not "most" of the work being done in the country's economy. Not even close.
The more big companies get involved in forcing standards, the less the single developer at home has to say about what happens with the OS.
And the more that single developers insist on trotting out oddball standards for everything that comes to mind, the less they'll be able to complain about business users not adopting Linux.
If Money driven corporations start calling shots
They're called "users with money to spend." You're confusing the vendors with the people the vendors work for (users). No happy users, no vendor profit. No profit, no vendor at all. No big vendors, no one for large business users to trust with their IT services/support... except maybe Microsoft.
standards that work best with their business model
And without customers wanting (and paying for) what they do, they wouldn't have any business at all, and you wouldn't have Adobe or IBM, or anyone else backing the better things that some "single developers" do come up with. But when a standard makes sense, and is adopted by both business users and the companies that serve them, that usually triggers both a large wave of additional development around that standard, and wider use of the resulting platform/apps by businesses. You can't get broad use at the office (and thus an urge for people to switch on the machine they use at home, too) without standards backed by the people that serve those businesses.
Come now. We already have have wind power, solar power, geothermal power, and more operating at the residential and community level all around the country. No need for the tinfoil, here.
I guess by that they just mean that it's not the poor who benefit from the taxes?
Actually, in the US, the poor benefit the most from the taxes, and pay the least (or none). The top 50% of earners in the country pay over 96% of the taxes. The top 1% of earners pay over %34 percent of the taxes. If you're "poor" in the US, you not only pay no income taxes, you get credits and "refunds" against the taxes you haven't paid. Yes, that's socialism, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter. There is no justification for killing another person, no matter much you hate them or they hate you.
It has nothing to do with whether or how much I "hate" them. It has everything to do with whether they are willing, able, motivated, and unswayable from their plans to kill me, or you, or my family, or anyone else for that matter.
Rather than bothering with hypotheticals, let's just take a regularly recurring actual example. Let's say that a guy living in Iraq is sick and tired of left-over Baathists and out-of-town Syrians/Jordanians/Saudis armed with Iranian- and Korean-made weapons trying their level best (by capriciously killing Iraqis) to prevent democracy from taking root in his country and the region. Let's say that he's aware of a house on the outskirts of Baghdad in and out which he's seen insurgents moving the night before. So, he tells a local member of the Iraqi armed forces what he knows. That guy moves the info up the chain of command, and local US intel finds out about it. So one of the Predator drones that's humming along quietly above that zone turns its imaging hardware on the house in question, and sure enough, there's a crew of armed guys loading mortars and a launcher into the bed of a pickup truck.
The predator follows them as they make their way a mile or two to a schoolyard where they set up the mortar and prepare to launch rounds a thousand yards or so to the east, right into a market where people are setting up to buy and sell produce.
So... what would you do? You've got mere moments before the people in question use an innaccurate weapon to indiscriminately kill people who are buying groceries just because they hope that doing so will instill a sense of terror in a population that has elections coming up. The clock's ticking... they're loading a mortar round into the tube, right now. Were you planning on getting on the phone and sending the local hight school Conflict Mediation Specialist to the schoolyard to discuss the insurgent's feelings, and see if maybe there are some after school basketball games or something would calm their urge to kill anyone who think democracy is a worthy pursuit?
The local Al Queda franchise operator, Al Zarqawi, has repeatedly indicated to his local team that "democracy is evil and un-Islamic" and that anyone who supports it should be killed. And of course, he's killed many, many people - including crowds of children gathering around police and soldiers to say hello, police cadets lining up to learn how to secure their towns, and so on. To say nothing of mortaring marketplaces, which brings us back to the ticking clock, and your little philosophical problem.
Your problem is that if you do nothing, innocent people are about to die, without question, and very shortly. Possibly dozens of them. Because you say there is never any justification for killing the three guys with the mortar rig, you are condemning mothers, kids, and vegetable merchants to being shredded where they stand. Or, you can use the incredibly precise technology at your disposal, and use the Predator's onboard tools to remove those three guys and their weapons from the face of the planet. Right now, before they kill people in the marketplace.
So, your philosophy would result in the deaths of dozens (and of course, if such attacks go completely unchecked, a never ending stream of more such), whereas my philosophy would result in three dead insurgents, and a marketplace full of people that will be able to go about their lives, including the act of voting for their own representatives - the very thing that the insurgents want to stop. I find your willingness to stand idly by and be a spectator to the death of innocents to be morally repugnant.
By the way - if I had the ability to stop, with a bullet, a career terrorist from blowing up a restaurant where you and your friends and family were sitting down over a meal, would you consider it more noble and appropriate for you and your family to die (alon
With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for ... instead of killing each other?
Each other? It only takes one party, if you know what I mean. If you hadn't noticed, most of the killing going on is person-to-person murder. The killing to which we (the US and allies, as nations) are currently responding (lethally, as needed) is killing done by organizations that are organized around thuggo-/theo-cratic movements that don't think there are any unanswered questions, and that the very act of looking into such things is the heresy of infidels. When someone is really convinced on that subject, and is actually proud to blow you and your kids up in a restaurant, bus, or office tower - well, then yes, there starts to be an "each other" aspect to it. But to suggest that it's just some multi-dimensional hobby, which those of us disposed to hunting black holes could just stop if we felt like it... well, that's just not the csae.
You and I both want to spend more money hunting black holes, or learning how life evolves - but some cultures would rather neither they, nor we didn't, and are actually willing to kill people who consider those to be valid (and their-flavor-deity-insulting) pursuits. That's not a world view you can reason with, and when their more militant members go on a 70-virgin-fueled jaunt to rid the world of folks that don't see it their way, a certain amount of defensive violence starts to come into play. Happily, the military is one of the biggest investors in science and technology, so there's that, anyway.
No, sorry. The "don't care what businesses think" crowd shares a lot of members with the "Windoze is teh Suxx0r" crowd that can't understand why more people don't use Linux. When people use something every day at work, they're a lot more inclined to feel comfortable with it at home, sending picture of the kids to grandma, playing games, using eBay, etc. Wide adoption of non-MS stuff by large corporate users is a huge step towards making millions of people more comfortable with it at home. That will also showcase the various distros' shortcomings and add more fuel to the fire. Of course I realize that idiots who don't see the big picture and can't bring themselves to think two minutes into the future for a glimpse of it won't get it. But if pointing out reality helps even the occasional person get it, then my work here is done. Well, not really. But I've at least ranted ever so slightly less pointlessly into the howling winds of nerdly piousness and anti-pragmatism.
Look, if the don't-care-about-business-use-of-Linux(et al) people don't care, well... then they don't care! But the people that wish more users would adopt Linux have to care what businesses and business people think. You can't have it both ways.
He could care less about the innocent in jail
How much less could he care? A lot less? So, since he could care less, that means that he does care more about the innocent in jail than he does about other things (though you're not saying which).
decisions of the UN as you like in your attempt to prove them unfit to control the root server
Hmmm... like having Iran heading up a UN disarmament conference? Or assigning Libya to chair the UN's Commission on Civil Rights? You know, the commission that found that Castro's Cuba (having just immediately executed three of them, and then sentencing 79 other people trying to flee that country to decades in prison) should, as punishment, "receive a UN envoy" so that they could apologize. Such bracing discipline! Such reinforcement of liberty! You know, liberty: the very thing that the internet (and its name servers) need in order to be worth a damn.
Or, you could just look at the UN's humiliating non-response (even verbally!) to the slaughter and systematic rape (of villages, figuratively, and women, literally) by Islamic militants in Sudan. No need for me to link to sources there, since presumably you watch the news once in a while.
Or, you could take the behavior of the General Secretary, Kofi Annan. When a UN high commissioner (Ruud Lubbers) was accused of sexually harassing a subordinate, an internal investigation was launched. That investigation found the woman's complaint to be legitimate, but Annan dismissed the result in order to avoid censuring the man involved. As with so many other cases, the administrative leadership in that organization will let miserable things happen to individuals and to entire countries in order to avoid upsetting delegations.
When an entity like the UN, dealing with an actual shooting-at-planes-every-week and ignore-the-post-invasion-of-Kuwait-treaty charmer like Saddam, allows a stunningly corrupt thing like the oil for food operation to both enrich both the person it's supposed to control and buy blocking votes in the security council... imagine what sort of influence peddling will go on over non-hostility-related operations like DNS?
Do you really think that China's (with its permanent position on the UN security council and considerable other powers) influence on such governance will be favorable to open and free communications, especially as it relates to human rights and democracy? The UN's decision to make a brutal totalitarian country like China a permanent SC member is exactly the sort of thing that suggests what a mistake it would be to give the UN any influence on the root of the net's name space. But in most cases, it's not the citable UN decisions that prove their craven and capricious nature - it's their lack of action on countless fronts, and unwillingness to actually recognize the corrupt nature of so many of the member countries that makes it so obvious. You want sexist? Look at the UN's unwillingness to call sexist regimes what they are. You want racist? Look at the UN's unwillingness to talk out loud about one race slaughtering another because of race, or to allow ethnic cleansing in villages right next door to UN peacekeeping emplacements in the Balkans. Expect the exact same (totally hollow) commitment to freedom and equality by any UN group that starts to get involved in the most important global communications system ever seen.
You know something's wrong when they have to bring Congress into this.
But that's exactly the way to preface a controversial and important action. You know, so that later, there won't be any whining. You know, like how Congress saw all the same intelligence, and then voted for the action in Afghanistan and Iraq. That way, no one can complain about it only being the executive branch that... oh, wait. Never mind, people will whine no matter what we (with or without congressional activity) do about DNS authority. Since we're going to hear it anyway, we might as well take the opportunity to solidify our position on the matter, and make sure that at least most of the pieces of the 'net that we care about continue to function. Without some UN sub-committee, chaired this week by the technical experts from The Sudan, deciding that Allah doesn't the ".com" TLD should be used by women, etc.
They should just number them
Well, I'm just glad that you can come here to 66.35.250.151 and post your comments! I mean, the 66.35.250.151 crowd will definitely know where you're coming from. I was about to wish you'd mentioned a couple of other web sites in your discussion of the non-naming of Japanese storms, but it's just as well, since we wouldn't want those sites to get 66.35.250.151'ed.
I live the Washington, DC area. Just head downtown on any given day and you'll see the local Zombie Lurch Chapter doing their finest. There's even a delegation from every state. It's a veritable Church Of the Zombie Lurch. Second only, perhaps, to the nearest Junior High School literature classroom.
I don't have time to worry about that. I'm all busy worrying about that dangerous, growing Greenland ice sheet. Just like they said in the 70's, that Ice Age is coming. Or is the other way around? It's almost like there's a short, shallow supply of contradictory evidence and a lot of overblown political blather on every side! Almost like that, anyway. Causality shmausality.
Not to mention the extra equipment we'll need to measure the growing Greenland ice coverage.
Because the people helping out with all of that interactive, positive-anecdote information on Exploding Growth Micro-Cap Stocks all seem so generous with their time, and their message boards are all so positive and upbeat. I always feel so good about the time I spend learning about my options.
more software patents. That will solve almost all legal woes with clear cut lines of IP ownership
Except that most of the suits in mid-sized tech companies I know are all about contracts, billing, employment, office space, ADA compliance, hiring/firing... that sort of thing. Which explains why the non-tech company number is almost as high. Every business is pecked to death by this crap.
What makes you think the high stakes criminals who get caught are the only ones there are?
Because the very nature of that sort of behavior leaves a huge wake behind it. You simply can't take millions of dollars from a company (or cause it to go elsewhere without benefit to the company) for long before the house of cards crashes down. That's exactly what happened at Enron and all of the other high-profile cases that smell the same. Sometimes, of course, we're just talking about stupid management, who make poor choices and nearly drive companies into the ground out of foolishness (ahem, HP), but that's what boards of directors and institutional investors are supposed to correct (i.e., HP). When there's lack of oversight, and you've got a particularly crafty person with a personal delusion about no one noticing the broken P&L statement, you get a train wreck like Enron. And you get people going to jail, obviously, as they should.
What makes you think they typically lose more in monetary penalties than they gained?
Um... reading the facts. When you see a Ken Lay or similar buffoon having all of his assets siezed, losing his house, cars, and every liquid thing they have or ever will have (because they'll owe legal fees forever, too), that about covers it. That doesn't pay back the investors who foolishly didn't review the books as well or as often as they should have, but you won't find too many people making that mistake going forward. And of course, there are draconian things like SarBox that actually have teeth.
What makes you think their prison terms are commensurate with the damage done by their crimes?
I don't know, really, how to evaluate that except on a case-by-case basis. Is running a company into the ground the same as rape? Or murder? Perhaps. Is investing in any businesses a risk? Sure... but being defrauded does tend to make one a smarter investor. I know that if I worked somewhere that ran its own internal 401, and all of the stock was in that company... I'd be getting the hell out, that's for sure. Ebbers, from WorldCom, got 25 years. For him, that's a life sentence. Good enough for you?
No, I'd say that your self image relies on convincing yourself that the only difference between you and someone who makes more money than you is corruption.
Except, I've worked for and with numerous small-, mid-, and big-sized operations. They are audited ruthlessly, and the bigger they are, the more transparent their bookeeping is (and legally, has to be). You are completely clouded by your idea of what a "CEO" is. The vast majority of the jobs, growth, innovation, productivity, and actual transactional business in this country is conducted by smaller businesses. Even companies with 10 employees have chief executives. Their "cronies" are usually their cousins or friends who have scraped together the money and sweat equity to start a business. Your demon-like fantasy bad guy running a business is the exception, not anything like the rule. Most people are decent human beings, and I know and support hundreds (who work with thousands) that don't put up with the poorly-imagined evil paper dolls that you suggest run most businesses.
Then again, I suppose you probably think that the X-Files was a documentary, too.
Now, about the injustice you think I tolerate. How many many hours do you suppose I've put into defending businesses from the technical pieces of account attacks, financial fraud, theft of every variety (inside, outside, in-transit, etc)... well, it's a career. Businesses, from small mom-and-pops up to larger organizations (including one of my more common types of customers: non-profit associations that process donations and other financial instruments, which, by-the-way, also have CEOs) are pummeled, day in, day out, with loss-inducing crapstorms from unethical people of every stripe - but most of them small-time (and lame) attempts from twits that think they won't get caught.
The cost to all of us, in the form of higher prices (because of lost services and merchandise, jacked up insurance rates, etc) and lost productivity is in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year. This type of loss - from both employees and outsiders - is enough to drive many businesses out of business, and is one of the reasons that many small businesses decide to merge and acquire each other, so that they can pool resources, and weather/prevent such losses through the type of focus that it's hard for smaller shops to handle. But the people that run and invest in those companies - who have everything to lose if they go under - are now operating under fantastically proctological beasts like Sarbanes-Oxley, the cost of which (of course) is just added to what we all pay. But in practice, the transparency in accounting under that act is pretty much impossible to avoid. And so what? The people investing their money in those businesses are the ones that insist on that sort of accountability anyway. That's why you get shareholder suits when management screws around with the books.
Your imaginary culture of mafia business people running the economy would be laughable if it weren't so commonly reinforced in popular entertainment (ironic, of course, since popular entertainment is itself generally presented by large business operations). The real echo-chamber for this nonsense, though, is the never-had-a-real-job and never-ran-a-business left-ish college student universe. They usually wake up when they're 30 or so, or when their best friend (crony, you say?) actually does start a business and they get to see what it's all actually about.
truth of the matter is that one almost has to be corrupt to get to that level in business
Being smart, hardworking, sometimes lucky, persuasive, and able to earn the trust of investors (including grandmothers re-aligning their 401k accounts) does not equal corruption. Thinking otherwise is a real injustice, because it's that perspective that causes a lot of people to spend at least a decade or so of their adult life operating on poisonous mixed premises and being bitter over the wrong things.
It's funny how we seem to get most upset when it's people who have almost nothing doing the scamming. Yet when rich folk do scamming, like the Savings & Loan scandal, Enron, Worldcom, and so on, people don't get so upset.
What the hell are you talking about? This is not insightful, this is class-baiting anti-business nonsense painting with a stupidly broad brush and getting the facts wrong (not that doing so ever stopped a good anti-business rant, of course). But let's say you're immune to all of the CEOs-Going-To-Jail media coverage. The reason "we" don't get so upset is because something is done about people like that. They lose their jobs, page huge (usually bankrupting) fines, and then give up their liberty as they go to actual prison. The billions and billions that are lost to petty scams, inside retail theft, check/credit fraud, identity theft... that stuff makes us mad because people are rarely caught. Profiles about people who do it are inflammatory for that very reason.
That's exactly his point. This isn't a cultural issue, this is just shady people trying to scam other potentially-shady people. That bit of the human psyche crosses borders just fine.
I'm not making a moral judgement here.
Why not? It's a no-brainer. The scams are ojectively wrong, by any rational view, period. That they are trying to scam people with a thin ethical shield doesn't make the scam somehow relatively OK. If the government did that, we'd call it entrapment.
These are people that are sitting around for hour in cyber cafes spamming. They're not begging in the street, or trying to grow just one more sweet potatoe in a dry field.
Never mind that your child could do. There are lots of things your child could do, but should not do.
Next thing you'll be saying that just because it's on a computer or a network, that the same general civilized ethics as used in the real world should still apply. Where's the moral relativism? Where's the it's-Tech-so-all-bets-are-off slashdottedness? Sorry, I guess I've read a few too many comments here that would excuse anything done by any kid as long as it can be connected, no matter how obliquely, to learning PHP or (for academic reasons, of course) testing rootkit deployments.
Thanks for using the word "integrity" outside of the foreign-key-in-a-database context.
Yes, but I think you'll find that it's the poor who do most of the work.
Really? Do you really think that's true? I live in a middle-middle class neighborhood. Everyone in that economic class are paying taxes, and pretty much every household as two, hard-working adults, with at least one person working grueling hours, or sometimes two jobs. Adjoining us is a neighborood comprized largely of subsidized housing. Driving past it, you see work-age adults sitting on front steps at all hours of the day and night, and these are typically households with many more children than in the households with busy working adults. How does that plug into your who-does-the-work, who-pays-the-taxes, and who-gets-the-entitlements statement?
The huge productivity of our economy revolves around the efficiencies that are generated by knowledge workers, high-tech enablers of growing businesses, and so on. Yes, somebody still gets paid to serve burgers and do landscaping, but there's a reason those are considered entry-level jobs. Regardless, those are not "most" of the work being done in the country's economy. Not even close.
The more big companies get involved in forcing standards, the less the single developer at home has to say about what happens with the OS.
And the more that single developers insist on trotting out oddball standards for everything that comes to mind, the less they'll be able to complain about business users not adopting Linux.
If Money driven corporations start calling shots
They're called "users with money to spend." You're confusing the vendors with the people the vendors work for (users). No happy users, no vendor profit. No profit, no vendor at all. No big vendors, no one for large business users to trust with their IT services/support... except maybe Microsoft.
standards that work best with their business model
And without customers wanting (and paying for) what they do, they wouldn't have any business at all, and you wouldn't have Adobe or IBM, or anyone else backing the better things that some "single developers" do come up with. But when a standard makes sense, and is adopted by both business users and the companies that serve them, that usually triggers both a large wave of additional development around that standard, and wider use of the resulting platform/apps by businesses. You can't get broad use at the office (and thus an urge for people to switch on the machine they use at home, too) without standards backed by the people that serve those businesses.
Come now. We already have have wind power, solar power, geothermal power, and more operating at the residential and community level all around the country. No need for the tinfoil, here.
I guess by that they just mean that it's not the poor who benefit from the taxes?
Actually, in the US, the poor benefit the most from the taxes, and pay the least (or none). The top 50% of earners in the country pay over 96% of the taxes. The top 1% of earners pay over %34 percent of the taxes. If you're "poor" in the US, you not only pay no income taxes, you get credits and "refunds" against the taxes you haven't paid. Yes, that's socialism, unfortunately.
... just go pick up a copy of People magazine and hold up the picture in front of the phone.
Too little security, too much inconvieniece
But I'm betting you wouldn't sign a waiver relieving them of liability if you opt out of using their T-FA...