How can property be blaimed for wrongdoing? How can property be liable for damages?
What is the moral basis to justify limited liability?
I suspect that many, perhaps even most, corporations are owned by a single owner. They are just shields to protect the owners from taking responsibility for their mistakes. (and shifting the cost for those mistakes to the public)
Why redefine what boils down to natural social interactions? Leave it alone and learn to fight in the current system..;)
corporations are a natural social interaction? I beg to differ.
If you said communities are a natural social interaction, I would probably agree. Corporations on the other hand are a relatively new invention. They are purely a legal construction. Find me a single instance of a "natural corporation".
The current system needs to be fixed. My objective isn't to irradicate corporations. It is to have corporations fullfil a useful function rather than a harmful function.
I say, the concept of property owning property and limited liability is unnatural.
I am not putting forward the position that 'unnatural' means wrong. I am simply refuting your statement that corporations are 'natural'.
in the alternative:
even if they are natural, they are still harmful to people and should be put under better control.
The WTO is put in place to remove sovereign powers for the benefit of the business community (read: multinational conglomerates). Boohoo if it offends the WTO. As others have said. The US violates its WTO obligations whenever it makes financial sense to do so.
The question is. Why do governments constantly feel the need to help corporations to 'compete'. Isn't the whole point of capitalism to allow firms to compete fairly in a FREE MARKET. If a corporation can not compete it is, according to that theory, inefficient and a detriment to the entire economy. It should be allowed to die (or be eaten by its competetors).
Ubisoft certainly would not bat an eyelash to help the french public if it perceived doing so would in the overall scheme of things, make it less competetive or hurt the bottom line.
Will we ever learn?
If the people of france (through their government) want to produce french video games they should either make it mandatory or create a state run video game company/ministry/department or impose tarrifs or taxes on all video games sold which are not french enough (however they choose to define that.) Perhaps spend more money training citizens to write french video games (however that is defined). Or even directly subsidize video game developers (I mean the human beings) by giving anyone who works in that field a tax incentive. (this would make more video game developers want to live in france).
Spending public money to help the current management of Ubisoft, the corporation, maintain control of the company is unfair and ineffective. The taxpayer is being ripped off, because Ubisoft will continue to do what it by its very nature must always do. Try to make as much profit as possible selling whatever video games the market demands.
How does this cause Ubisoft to become more french? Ubisoft will always cater to the demands of the market (producing no more and no less french content than the market demands).
The only beneficiaries of this are the Ubisoft shareholders. The people of france as well as any possible up and comming french video game developers are getting screwed.
the United States of America _cannot and will not_ be going bankrupt within the next decade. Indeed, this is the most idiotic idea I've seen on Slashdot within the past week or so. That's saying quite a lot.
You know how you go bankrupt when you're in lots of debt? That's because you can't find the money to pay it off. You know what the difference between you and a state is? Taxes.
The state is free to raise taxes on individuals, however thanks to free trade the state in now in a position where it is very difficult to raise taxes on corporations.
With just a few more neoliberal treaties in place it may effectively become illegal to raise taxes on corporations. that is to say, that corporations will have the right to sue for damages if the tax is raised.
The basic logic is as follows : I made investment X, because you said the tax rate was Y. Now you are increasing Y and harming my investment X, and therefore you must compensate me.
This doesn't apply to individuals of course. Our precious little private property does not have the highly cherished status of "investment".
As more and more wealth is tranferred from the state and individuals to private corporations, the state will have no choice but to privatize more and more of its holdings until finally the state has nothing left of value. The state will become nothing more than the "moral" authority to impose violence against the population. Serving at the beck and call of corporations who would rather not soil their carefully designed and focus group tested public images by directly oppressing the people.
No. The state will never become bankrupt. The State and private corporate concerns will enter into a partnership (perhaps via the IMF). We the people will support it and love it and be greatful for our "business leaders" saving us from what would otherwise be bankrupcty.
A bankruptcy the "business community" manufactured for their own self agrandizement.
The goal is to obtain every last penny of our property until we have no choice but to slave for mere survival. To do whatever is asked of us out of fear of starvation or losing our health insurance. To have a state so cash starved that it has no choice but to tax individuals out of our wages. Of course DIVIDENDS should not be taxed. That is immoral. Estates should not be taxes. That is immoral. But your wages??? Forget that you earned your wages with actual WORK (rather than simply sitting on your ass and watching the dollars roll in). Your wages should be taxed.
working is bad. siting on your ass and getting money for nothing. *that* is the american dream and the state has a duty to encourage it.
The company invests potential millions in R&D to develop the product in question.
There are many human millionaires. In fact, we justify their existence by suggesting that we need wealthy people in order to undertake certain projects which are beyond the means of contemplation to the average individual.
Corporations were the solution to the problem of 'how do you entice private individuals to build a railroad or a bridge, which would benefit society at large, when there is so much potential liability involved?'
enter: limited liability
that VAST majority of patents and copyrighted material DID NOT COST MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create. And were invented by individuals and would be invented with or without limited liability.
Many of the remaining inventions were invented largely by public funds and should rightfully belong to the public.
You are taking the case of a small number of inventions in order to justify a malfunctioning system to the majority.
Is there a reason that all IP can not be owned either individually by a human being or jointly by multiple human beings.
Are there any inventions you suspect would not have been invented had it not been for corporate IP rights?
Corporations should only be granted rights out of some pressing need. corporations are not people, they have no feelings or opinions.
We don't give rights to animals, and animals are closer to human beings than corporations are.
I devised this idea only a few days ago, so I am interested in knowing its flaws. I'm not religious about it, but it seems to make sense.
If I am a millionaire (I'm not), what is to stop me from entering into a partnership with an inventor to do research on an invention. We can both jointly own the IP (we are human beings).
We can then create a corporation to actually sell and manufacture the product, and license the IP to the corporation.
Germany? What a perfect example of who NOT to emulate. Check out the average German wage relative to costs, the unemployment rate, the tax burden, or the smoldering black hole their pension system is becoming. Look at the stranglehold the unions have on industry there.
Especially considering their entire country was practically destroyed during WWII, chopped in half and occupied by the soviets, had to be rebuilt from scratch, and convert from communism to capitalism and reformed, while the USA went more or less unscathed. (I mean... excepting all the harm the civil rights did)
Considering that a major portion of the Cold War was practically fought inside Germany you would think Germany ought to have a higher standard of living than the United States by now.
I mean.. come on.. Japan has almost caught up, and the USA dropped 2 nukes on Japan and Japan is routinely hit by tsunami's, earthquakes and typhoons.
Perhaps we should be looking at the Patent system used in Norway, since Norway beats the United States in the Human Development Index ratings. In fact they beat most everyone these days.
ohhh... and Norway has same legal sex marriage. This should be the first patent law reform we implement. damn those civil rights.
I disagree, with your notion that people value their life at $10 million.
People do not perform risk analysis when they take a job. They need to take a job because the alternative is unemployment. A VERY HIGH RISK occupation.
Even if your calculus of risk:pay proportionality is correct, it doesn't consider that even risky jobs are often safer than being unemployed.
If you consider that, then it would seem that many people are actually getting paid in exchange for reduced risk. This would imply their lives have a NEGATIVE dollar value by your metric.
You also dont consider that most people dont want to work more than 40 hours a week, and you've assigned a value of $0 to all leasure hours.
Clearly people value both their leasure time as well as their work time. And since most people would not willingly work double hours for mere double pay, it would seem our leasure time is work much more than our work time.
If you assume that the first 8 hours of overtime are paid at 1.5 time and the next 8 hours are double time. We would get paid 4.5 times as much if you workd 24 hours, and considering that we only work about 25% of the time, just doing off the cuff math we would see that we should actually multiply your dollar figure by 18. So if we are to put a true dollar figure on a life, we may need to use the value $180,000,000 rather than a mere $10,000,000.
Last but not least. You dont consider all the BENEFIT that software piracy causes. software piracy allows people to access software they would otherwise not be able to afford. This is a GOOD thing.
Software piracy also creates more demand for computer hardware which benefits hardware manufacturers.
Now, you may debate whether or not people deserve free software or hardware manufacturers deserve an artificially inflated demand but the fact remains they are benefactors.
As a copyright holder you may claim that you are morally owed a million dollars for each copy of your work (and you may very well charge that much). But that doesn't make it morally true.
So, when we say $50,000,000 of copyright infringing material was seized we are of course talking about purely fictional value. A value chosen arbitrarily by the copyright holder and basically arbitrary when it comes to measuring a proper punishment.
So... how does software piracy compare to a single rape or murder monetarily now?
The harm caused by rape or murder is not arbitrary. It can not be compared to copyright infringement.
The bottom line is that if this society punishes copyright infringement more seriously than sexual assault it is an indication that this society considers it a more heinous crime. Trying to convert murder to a dollar value is utterly meaningless. Just as trying to conert copyright infringement to a dollar value.
The only objective dollar value is how much $ profit did the offender collect from his software piracy. Anything more than that is fictional value.
We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.
This price increase would have happened already if the US did not spend 10s of billions of dollars annually to facilitate the threat of military violence against oil producing nations if they did not "voluntarily" keep oil cheap.
If you factor that in, then you will find that the price of oil is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer.
In response to your glowing praises of the "free market" I have 3 things to say.
1: the market is NOT free. The free market is a fairy tail we are taught as children so that we dont question how the current regime of multinationals got into power. STATE interferrance. Now that they have achieved power they are quite happy to impose a FREE market on all the Russias and Iraqs (not to mention Colombia, Nicaragua or any other developing nation) of the world because the cards of a free market are massively stacked in favor of the current established global powers. It is state power which imposes IP restrictions against develping nations. State power which dictates the Iraqs economy must be run by the IMF for the next 10 years.
A free market means the US will use military power to supress the price of oil.
How is it that goods can cost drastically different prices in different jurisdictions? A free market? no. State rules put there for the benefit of businesses (most business being owned by a small number of multinationals) which make it a crime to import such good without permission of the copyright/patent holder. Not withstanding that the goods themselves are non infringing.
What is DVD region encoding? Free market?
Who makes it illegal to work and live in the local of your choosing? State power, applied for the benefit of the business community. Where is your free market?
Immigration laws insure cheap labour pools in developing nations.
The Free Market is the mantra of those with economic power. The small player has no chance to compete. And the morality of FREE MARKET (and the threat of sanctions, or a CIA orchestrated military coup) forces developing nations to allow huge multinational corporations to compete "fairly" in their local economies.
Right now state assistance seems to be focused on "stability" and this fantasy free market is getting damn well close to fascism. Corporations act as if profit is a right, and we believe them!
2: saving the earth does not make profit and thus you can never rely on private enterprise to do so.
3: sex drive is human nature. profit drive is learned.
Storing logs (of other peoples activity) is the same as storing something valuable which does not belong to you.
You are responsible if the logs are ever accessed by hackers or stolen during a break in. Do you really want that responsibility?
You should make it clear to your customers that you dont value their privacy nor trust them to control themselves and find it necessary to record their internet activity just in case.
I once had a call regarding an illegal offense that occurred and recieved a prelimnary call just to see if we had the authentication logs to match an IP address to a dial-up user. If we did have the data a warrant for the documentation would have been presented. The offender lucked out and it just so happened that we had a problem 3 months prior and lost a chunk of data. We also happened to run into a failure with our tape archive (library unit died and that was in the lot of tapes suspect of failure)... though there is some other detail I can't remember about the problem with retrieving that data was about.
You just proved the value in NOT keeping logs. Since you didn't have logs, you were spared being the victim of a search warrant.
Had you REALLY not had any logs, you would have been spared the time and expense of needing to try to find data just in case the cops wanted to perform a search warrant on you.
You have no guarantee that if you had answered in the affirmative about the logs that the cops would not have simply siezed your computers as evidence.
Likewise, you have no guarantee that even if you have logs your computers WONT be seized. Since keeping logs makes your computers into evidence, the existence of logs only increases the likelyhood of siezure.
As it stood, your lack of logs saved you from needing to get involved.
You are very lucky they didn't seize your equipment and attempt data recovery on it. If it was a serious investigation they would have.
If this is how we are going to do it, we should not be doing it. We should either commit the resources to do the project correctly or we move on to other needs.
Are you talking about the ISS or are you talking about the space shuttle?
Because the critical design flaw in the space shuttle, which has resulted in the grounding of the fleet, was NOT part of the plan.
But in the real world you overcome problems when they occur. If everyone always gave up and moved on to "other needs" at the slightest hickup, we would always be moving on the other needs without ever satisfying any of them.
Space travel is dangerous. No one is putting a gun to those astronauts' heads.
Something to the effect of the vendors machines being overhauled at the expense of the vendor or removed permanently in the state seems a bit more fitting for this degree of failure.
That would only amount to a mere refund.
After a vender sold you a defective product and caused you irreperable harm you would be entitled to damages as well.
And if recklessness or negligence were proved, you would be entitled to punitive damages.
What value does your vote have? Perhaps all the taxes you paid in 4 years? Who knows?
Perhaps the 20 minute figure that people like to bandy about has more to do with common user behaviors -- namely, the fact that most people don't even know what a service pack IS?
I've personally had an XP pro machine infected by a worm wirelessly over a GPRS connection. I wanted to test the claims.
It took about 4 hours of total online time, I didn't download any software or email.
For most of those 4 hours, the built in firewall was on. But I turned it off for about 10 minutes and the machine was infected.
A worm found that port 445 was open on my machine and took over the machine. Thereafter my machine attempted to connect to random ip addresses on port 445 and no other internet connectivity worked at all.
The scary thing is that I saw my machine successfully connect to a few of those random IP addresses.
A virus checker found 5 infected executables. Executable programs I had never heard of. Including a batch file.
I also personally witnessed a windows 2000 machine suffer the same fate (but different worm) in less than 1 hour. Remember, this is OVER 56kbps GPRS.
Believe me. From personal experience I can attest that you dont have time to download the latest service pack before your machine is infected.
You may get lucky, but is all it is. LUCK.
If you are using a DSL connection and your machine is using a 192.x.x.x private IP address that could explain why you aren't getting an infection. Your DSL modem is essentially firewalling you.
Fortunately antivirus software cleaned up the mess with no loss of any data. (as far as I know).
"Oh noes! Why aren't we all doomed yet?! Is it because you don't know what the fuck you're talking about? It's not like there's a balance of power between all parties... and etc. Obvious."
a "balance" of power?
This "balance" as you call it certainly seems to result in a lot of oppression, death and human suffering. And there is no indication that human suffering is on the decline. No... there have been no genocides this year.
No.. Clinton did not fire ICBM's at a pharmaceutical factory (which was not producing any WMD) but was in fact the source of 50% of the low-cost medicine in a small third world country, which can not afford to import medicine from the west, and has subsequently resulted in the thousands of preventable deaths of innocent bystanders. A country which is not right now in the throws of a civil war.
No.. The Bush White House did not intentionally distort the truth in regards to the existence of WMD in Iraq or the "connection" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, who was no threat to the USA, but was a big threat to Saudi Aradian and Kuwaiti oil fields.
No.. The Reagan Administration did not provide financial support to terrorists in Nicaragua and obtain those funds by selling illegal arms to Iran.
No. George Bush senior did not lie to the American Public about the existence of 10s of thousands of Iraqi troops arrayed along the Iraqi border, in preparation to invade Saudi Arabia.
No... copyright durations have not been extended retroactively to 70 years after an authors death with out any compensation to the public good which is deprived of 20 years worth of material which the original authors created fully expecting the material to become public domain by now.
No... people are not being put in jail without a lawyer, without being charged and without any possibility of a hearing before a court except at the presidents whim.
And none of those non-existant people are ever tortured or have their genitals mutilated, nor are any murdered.
And absolutely no high level members of any organized crime families have any interest or controlling shares in in corporate America. Corporate america is too righteous to do business with the "criminals". Crime and greed just dont mix.
No american companies have been doing business with Iran in violation of international trade embargoes, and no american company would ever dream of exploiting child labour or taking advantage of non-existant or unenforced environmental protection laws in third world countries in order to increase profits.
And no one who would ever force 12 year olds to work 16 hour shifts on a factory floor for practically no pay, or dump tons of toxic waste into local water supplies.
And no.. the government never spends hundreds of millions of dollars bailing out bankrupt corporations which according to free market principles ought to be left to compete or fail on their own.
Pull your head out of your ass before you start accusing other people of ignorance.
For those you want to know how to use encrypted swap paritions on Linux here is how: PS: Your computer will not operate any slower than when using plain swap. I kid you not. PPS: this works in mandrake and suse.
make sure module cryptoloop is loaded:
> modprobe cryptoloop
assuming you want to use/dev/hdb as your swap partition (you can actually use any partition or even a flat file) then type:
>losetup -e aes256/dev/loop0/dev/hdb
if/dev/loop0 doesn't work, try loop1 or loop2 etc. (you are looking for an unused loopback device. If you are already using loopback devices, then you probably already know how to do this stuff)
you will be prompted for a passphrase. type lots of random characters (at least 20. the more the merrier). You don't need to remember it because you can use a different one each time you reboot. I like to click random keys on the keyboard for about 45 seconds.
then type
>mkswap/dev/loop0 this formats the partition on the other side of the loopback device to be a swap file. (remember that loop0 is being encrypted prior to the data ever hitting the disk)
and then type
>swapon/dev/loop0 this mounts the swap partition to be a swap file.
you now have an encrypted swap partition all mounted and available as virtual memory. Use 'top' to confirm this.
This swap will not automount at boot this way, unless you put the aforementioned steps into a boot script of some kind. You can deny it or make a script to do it for you. Just make sure you use a random key each time.
I have been using encrypted swap paritions for a few years and I'm never going back.
(hint you can also make encrypted volumns using almost the same steps)
The nifty thing is that since you don't know the keys you use for your swap parition you have plausible deniability.
Big Brother would prefer to have proof. It is a lot cleaner that way.
Most corporations are not yet big enough on their own to openly kill their "problems" and therefore can only achieve the ultimate solution by presenting proof to a court of law.
The courts of law still maintain the facade of justice (at least towards defendants with enough money to defend themselves completely). And generally in most public courts if you can provide irrefutable proof that a document can be easily forged, the court must demand some iota of evidence from the party presenting the document that this document is in fact what they purport it to be.
However documents which are digitally signed with keys that are only in the possession of the adverse party are pretty much presumed authentic. (by adverse party I mean the party which the evidence is being used against).
Publishing the encryption key as a matter of course is a good step in defeating this, as now all parties have access to the encryption keys. So the mere existence of a message encrypted with them doesn't itself prove who made the message.
(I didn't study the OTR algorithm carefully enough to understand how it prevents other parties from reading the messages after the fact.)
You seem to forget that corporations are often owned by many normal citizens like you and me along with a fair share of very rich citizens of course. Let's not forget this fact before we start villifying anything with word corporation in it.
"often owned by many normal citizens" perhaps.. but usually not. If you take any share chosen randomly and determine the owner, you will, much more often than not, find that it is owned by of the "fair share" of elite.
So please define your use of the term "fair share". The distribution of corporate ownership seems to defy any meaning of the term "fair share" that I know of.
Something is vile on its own merit. It doesn't matter if a small percentage of the corporation is owned by people who would be appalled and dismayed if they knew what they were a part of. The controlling share is owned by the elite.
But the problem is not merely one of unfair wealth distribution. Corporations routinely engage in practices which are despicable. And we allow it to continue out of fear that somehow doing good will "hurt business".
Rarely do we ask ourselves if something we do is going to hurt people. Presumably people can take care of themselves.. but business is a defenseless child we must nurture and love.
This is especially the governments duty. (how it became the governments duty.......... well.. business told us it was.)
I said: War should be waged because it is morally necessary.
you replied: "Somebody else already responded with a similar message, but I also don't agree with your statement. War should be waged for reasons of SURVIVAL, not for any other reason."
Who's survival?
Your own? your family's? Your king's? What do you mean by "survival?"
If you would be guaranteed "survival" by colabaration or surrender to a invading force, then you would advocate colabaration or surrender?
If you know that a war is morally necessary, and you do not go to war, then you are morally culpable for whatever evil occurs thereafter which that war would have prevented.
On the otherhand... I dont agree with the notion that you should go to war simply because the government or your boss tells you to. You must be personally convinced in the necessity, otherwise you are nothing more than a paid killer.
Yes, I see your point that it _should_ be based on morals only, but what kind of morals are we talking about? During the cold war, both US and USSR spent one helluva lot of money because they both wanted to save the world from the evils of either Communism or Democracy. If we accept your viewpoint, there is nothing to judge it by.
Actually... the USSR wanted to save the world from the evils of CAPITALISM. Capitalism is not democracy.
I believe it was american capitalists who coined the phrase "the evils of democracy".
The judgements ought to have been made BEFORE the cold war and during the cold war and without a profit motive.
However... if corporations may not profit from war, that would really cause corporations to consider wether they should encourage governments to wage it.
As for the morality of the war itself. That is something that human beings may judge and decide. Corporations always vote in favour of profit.
That confounding profit factor ought to be eliminated from the equation of war.
The fact that most wars historically have been immoral does not change the fact that war ought to be moral.
Slashdot Mirror
A corporation is not a group of people.
;)
A corporation is property.
How is it natural for property to own property?
More importantly:
How can property be blaimed for wrongdoing? How can property be liable for damages?
What is the moral basis to justify limited liability?
I suspect that many, perhaps even most, corporations are owned by a single owner. They are just shields to protect the owners from taking responsibility for their mistakes. (and shifting the cost for those mistakes to the public)
Why redefine what boils down to natural social interactions? Leave it alone and learn to fight in the current system..
corporations are a natural social interaction? I beg to differ.
If you said communities are a natural social interaction, I would probably agree. Corporations on the other hand are a relatively new invention. They are purely a legal construction. Find me a single instance of a "natural corporation".
The current system needs to be fixed. My objective isn't to irradicate corporations. It is to have corporations fullfil a useful function rather than a harmful function.
I say, the concept of property owning property and limited liability is unnatural.
I am not putting forward the position that 'unnatural' means wrong. I am simply refuting your statement that corporations are 'natural'.
in the alternative:
even if they are natural, they are still harmful to people and should be put under better control.
The WTO is put in place to remove sovereign powers for the benefit of the business community (read: multinational conglomerates). Boohoo if it offends the WTO. As others have said. The US violates its WTO obligations whenever it makes financial sense to do so.
The question is. Why do governments constantly feel the need to help corporations to 'compete'. Isn't the whole point of capitalism to allow firms to compete fairly in a FREE MARKET. If a corporation can not compete it is, according to that theory, inefficient and a detriment to the entire economy. It should be allowed to die (or be eaten by its competetors).
Ubisoft certainly would not bat an eyelash to help the french public if it perceived doing so would in the overall scheme of things, make it less competetive or hurt the bottom line.
Will we ever learn?
If the people of france (through their government) want to produce french video games they should either make it mandatory or create a state run video game company/ministry/department or impose tarrifs or taxes on all video games sold which are not french enough (however they choose to define that.) Perhaps spend more money training citizens to write french video games (however that is defined). Or even directly subsidize video game developers (I mean the human beings) by giving anyone who works in that field a tax incentive. (this would make more video game developers want to live in france).
Spending public money to help the current management of Ubisoft, the corporation, maintain control of the company is unfair and ineffective. The taxpayer is being ripped off, because Ubisoft will continue to do what it by its very nature must always do. Try to make as much profit as possible selling whatever video games the market demands.
How does this cause Ubisoft to become more french? Ubisoft will always cater to the demands of the market (producing no more and no less french content than the market demands).
The only beneficiaries of this are the Ubisoft shareholders. The people of france as well as any possible up and comming french video game developers are getting screwed.
the United States of America _cannot and will not_ be going bankrupt within the next decade. Indeed, this is the most idiotic idea I've seen on Slashdot within the past week or so. That's saying quite a lot.
You know how you go bankrupt when you're in lots of debt? That's because you can't find the money to pay it off. You know what the difference between you and a state is? Taxes.
The state is free to raise taxes on individuals, however thanks to free trade the state in now in a position where it is very difficult to raise taxes on corporations.
With just a few more neoliberal treaties in place it may effectively become illegal to raise taxes on corporations. that is to say, that corporations will have the right to sue for damages if the tax is raised.
The basic logic is as follows : I made investment X, because you said the tax rate was Y. Now you are increasing Y and harming my investment X, and therefore you must compensate me.
This doesn't apply to individuals of course. Our precious little private property does not have the highly cherished status of "investment".
As more and more wealth is tranferred from the state and individuals to private corporations, the state will have no choice but to privatize more and more of its holdings until finally the state has nothing left of value. The state will become nothing more than the "moral" authority to impose violence against the population. Serving at the beck and call of corporations who would rather not soil their carefully designed and focus group tested public images by directly oppressing the people.
No. The state will never become bankrupt. The State and private corporate concerns will enter into a partnership (perhaps via the IMF). We the people will support it and love it and be greatful for our "business leaders" saving us from what would otherwise be bankrupcty.
A bankruptcy the "business community" manufactured for their own self agrandizement.
The goal is to obtain every last penny of our property until we have no choice but to slave for mere survival. To do whatever is asked of us out of fear of starvation or losing our health insurance. To have a state so cash starved that it has no choice but to tax individuals out of our wages. Of course DIVIDENDS should not be taxed. That is immoral. Estates should not be taxes. That is immoral. But your wages??? Forget that you earned your wages with actual WORK (rather than simply sitting on your ass and watching the dollars roll in). Your wages should be taxed.
working is bad. siting on your ass and getting money for nothing. *that* is the american dream and the state has a duty to encourage it.
Mod the parent post funny.
The company invests potential millions in R&D to develop the product in question.
There are many human millionaires. In fact, we justify their existence by suggesting that we need wealthy people in order to undertake certain projects which are beyond the means of contemplation to the average individual.
Corporations were the solution to the problem of 'how do you entice private individuals to build a railroad or a bridge, which would benefit society at large, when there is so much potential liability involved?'
enter: limited liability
that VAST majority of patents and copyrighted material DID NOT COST MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create. And were invented by individuals and would be invented with or without limited liability.
Many of the remaining inventions were invented largely by public funds and should rightfully belong to the public.
You are taking the case of a small number of inventions in order to justify a malfunctioning system to the majority.
Is there a reason that all IP can not be owned either individually by a human being or jointly by multiple human beings.
Are there any inventions you suspect would not have been invented had it not been for corporate IP rights?
Corporations should only be granted rights out of some pressing need. corporations are not people, they have no feelings or opinions.
We don't give rights to animals, and animals are closer to human beings than corporations are.
I devised this idea only a few days ago, so I am interested in knowing its flaws. I'm not religious about it, but it seems to make sense.
If I am a millionaire (I'm not), what is to stop me from entering into a partnership with an inventor to do research on an invention. We can both jointly own the IP (we are human beings).
We can then create a corporation to actually sell and manufacture the product, and license the IP to the corporation.
Germany? What a perfect example of who NOT to emulate. Check out the average German wage relative to costs, the unemployment rate, the tax burden, or the smoldering black hole their pension system is becoming. Look at the stranglehold the unions have on industry there.
Especially considering their entire country was practically destroyed during WWII, chopped in half and occupied by the soviets, had to be rebuilt from scratch, and convert from communism to capitalism and reformed, while the USA went more or less unscathed. (I mean... excepting all the harm the civil rights did)
Considering that a major portion of the Cold War was practically fought inside Germany you would think Germany ought to have a higher standard of living than the United States by now.
I mean.. come on.. Japan has almost caught up, and the USA dropped 2 nukes on Japan and Japan is routinely hit by tsunami's, earthquakes and typhoons.
Perhaps we should be looking at the Patent system used in Norway, since Norway beats the United States in the Human Development Index ratings. In fact they beat most everyone these days.
ohhh... and Norway has same legal sex marriage. This should be the first patent law reform we implement.
damn those civil rights.
I have a solution. Make it illegal for corporations to own intellectual property.
Considering that corporations are completely devoid of intellect it seems quite unnatural that corporations have any RIGHT to intellectual property.
At the very least this would force a corporation to continue to employ a human being in order to enjoy the monopoly granted by intellectual property.
What moral justification is there for a corporation to be able to OWN intellectual property?
I disagree, with your notion that people value their life at $10 million.
People do not perform risk analysis when they take a job. They need to take a job because the alternative is unemployment. A VERY HIGH RISK occupation.
Even if your calculus of risk:pay proportionality is correct, it doesn't consider that even risky jobs are often safer than being unemployed.
If you consider that, then it would seem that many people are actually getting paid in exchange for reduced risk. This would imply their lives have a NEGATIVE dollar value by your metric.
You also dont consider that most people dont want to work more than 40 hours a week, and you've assigned a value of $0 to all leasure hours.
Clearly people value both their leasure time as well as their work time. And since most people would not willingly work double hours for mere double pay, it would seem our leasure time is work much more than our work time.
If you assume that the first 8 hours of overtime are paid at 1.5 time and the next 8 hours are double time. We would get paid 4.5 times as much if you workd 24 hours, and considering that we only work about 25% of the time, just doing off the cuff math we would see that we should actually multiply your dollar figure by 18. So if we are to put a true dollar figure on a life, we may need to use the value $180,000,000 rather than a mere $10,000,000.
Last but not least. You dont consider all the BENEFIT that software piracy causes. software piracy allows people to access software they would otherwise not be able to afford. This is a GOOD thing.
Software piracy also creates more demand for computer hardware which benefits hardware manufacturers.
Now, you may debate whether or not people deserve free software or hardware manufacturers deserve an artificially inflated demand but the fact remains they are benefactors.
As a copyright holder you may claim that you are morally owed a million dollars for each copy of your work (and you may very well charge that much). But that doesn't make it morally true.
So, when we say $50,000,000 of copyright infringing material was seized we are of course talking about purely fictional value. A value chosen arbitrarily by the copyright holder and basically arbitrary when it comes to measuring a proper punishment.
So... how does software piracy compare to a single rape or murder monetarily now?
The harm caused by rape or murder is not arbitrary. It can not be compared to copyright infringement.
The bottom line is that if this society punishes copyright infringement more seriously than sexual assault it is an indication that this society considers it a more heinous crime. Trying to convert murder to a dollar value is utterly meaningless. Just as trying to conert copyright infringement to a dollar value.
The only objective dollar value is how much $ profit did the offender collect from his software piracy. Anything more than that is fictional value.
As is your $10,000,000 per life.
The whole notion of trying to peg a $ value on the crime of rape is meaningless and misleading.
But it isn't rco3's fault. Rco3 was using the scale introduced by the original poster: Ogemaniac
We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.
This price increase would have happened already if the US did not spend 10s of billions of dollars annually to facilitate the threat of military violence against oil producing nations if they did not "voluntarily" keep oil cheap.
If you factor that in, then you will find that the price of oil is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer.
In response to your glowing praises of the "free market" I have 3 things to say.
1: the market is NOT free. The free market is a fairy tail we are taught as children so that we dont question how the current regime of multinationals got into power. STATE interferrance. Now that they have achieved power they are quite happy to impose a FREE market on all the Russias and Iraqs (not to mention Colombia, Nicaragua or any other developing nation) of the world because the cards of a free market are massively stacked in favor of the current established global powers. It is state power which imposes IP restrictions against develping nations. State power which dictates the Iraqs economy must be run by the IMF for the next 10 years.
A free market means the US will use military power to supress the price of oil.
How is it that goods can cost drastically different prices in different jurisdictions? A free market? no. State rules put there for the benefit of businesses (most business being owned by a small number of multinationals) which make it a crime to import such good without permission of the copyright/patent holder. Not withstanding that the goods themselves are non infringing.
What is DVD region encoding? Free market?
Who makes it illegal to work and live in the local of your choosing? State power, applied for the benefit of the business community. Where is your free market?
Immigration laws insure cheap labour pools in developing nations.
The Free Market is the mantra of those with economic power. The small player has no chance to compete. And the morality of FREE MARKET (and the threat of sanctions, or a CIA orchestrated military coup) forces developing nations to allow huge multinational corporations to compete "fairly" in their local economies.
Right now state assistance seems to be focused on "stability" and this fantasy free market is getting damn well close to fascism. Corporations act as if profit is a right, and we believe them!
2: saving the earth does not make profit and thus you can never rely on private enterprise to do so.
3: sex drive is human nature. profit drive is learned.
no aoniminity within your network.
Why not?
Sounds like a business opportunity to me. You could even charge extra for it.
The phone company sells unlisted phone numbers. Why shouldn't ISP's sell anonymous IPs?
This is for accountability sake.
Storing logs (of other peoples activity) is the same as storing something valuable which does not belong to you.
You are responsible if the logs are ever accessed by hackers or stolen during a break in. Do you really want that responsibility?
You should make it clear to your customers that you dont value their privacy nor trust them to control themselves and find it necessary to record their internet activity just in case.
I once had a call regarding an illegal offense that occurred and recieved a prelimnary call just to see if we had the authentication logs to match an IP address to a dial-up user. If we did have the data a warrant for the documentation would have been presented. The offender lucked out and it just so happened that we had a problem 3 months prior and lost a chunk of data. We also happened to run into a failure with our tape archive (library unit died and that was in the lot of tapes suspect of failure)... though there is some other detail I can't remember about the problem with retrieving that data was about.
You just proved the value in NOT keeping logs. Since you didn't have logs, you were spared being the victim of a search warrant.
Had you REALLY not had any logs, you would have been spared the time and expense of needing to try to find data just in case the cops wanted to perform a search warrant on you.
You have no guarantee that if you had answered in the affirmative about the logs that the cops would not have simply siezed your computers as evidence.
Likewise, you have no guarantee that even if you have logs your computers WONT be seized. Since keeping logs makes your computers into evidence, the existence of logs only increases the likelyhood of siezure.
As it stood, your lack of logs saved you from needing to get involved.
You are very lucky they didn't seize your equipment and attempt data recovery on it. If it was a serious investigation they would have.
Or they could have ordered a wiretap...
If this is how we are going to do it, we should not be doing it. We should either commit the resources to do the project correctly or we move on to other needs.
Are you talking about the ISS or are you talking about the space shuttle?
Because the critical design flaw in the space shuttle, which has resulted in the grounding of the fleet, was NOT part of the plan.
But in the real world you overcome problems when they occur. If everyone always gave up and moved on to "other needs" at the slightest hickup, we would always be moving on the other needs without ever satisfying any of them.
Space travel is dangerous. No one is putting a gun to those astronauts' heads.
"That's a threat? I'd say that a massive reduction in human population would be pretty beneficial in the long run . . ."
How about setting a good example and voluteering to witness the asteriod impact zone from ground 0.
Hell.. why wait? I'm sure there must be an active volcanoe you can throw yourself into, and start with the population reduction right away.
People are the only hope that any form of life originating on this planet has for long term survival.
Some of the surplus population you would like to be "reduced" will actually do something to make the world a better place. Perhaps even save it.
On my 2.6 kernal both aes256 and aes-256 are the same thing. And both work.
use whichever your kernal actually supports.
the cost of a mis-election is too high to be measured in MERE dollars.
The dollar is doing very poorly these days.
"Realistically we will never know who exactly was elected this year and that's a big problem."
Why are you trying to confuse the issue?
It is clear that voters overwelmingly choose George W. Bush to lead the nation for the next 4 years.
And these election results were specifically chosen to reflect that fact.
Something to the effect of the vendors machines being overhauled at the expense of the vendor or removed permanently in the state seems a bit more fitting for this degree of failure.
That would only amount to a mere refund.
After a vender sold you a defective product and caused you irreperable harm you would be entitled to damages as well.
And if recklessness or negligence were proved, you would be entitled to punitive damages.
What value does your vote have? Perhaps all the taxes you paid in 4 years?
Who knows?
Perhaps the 20 minute figure that people like to bandy about has more to do with common user behaviors -- namely, the fact that most people don't even know what a service pack IS?
I've personally had an XP pro machine infected by a worm wirelessly over a GPRS connection. I wanted to test the claims.
It took about 4 hours of total online time, I didn't download any software or email.
For most of those 4 hours, the built in firewall was on. But I turned it off for about 10 minutes and the machine was infected.
A worm found that port 445 was open on my machine and took over the machine. Thereafter my machine attempted to connect to random ip addresses on port 445 and no other internet connectivity worked at all.
The scary thing is that I saw my machine successfully connect to a few of those random IP addresses.
A virus checker found 5 infected executables. Executable programs I had never heard of. Including a batch file.
I also personally witnessed a windows 2000 machine suffer the same fate (but different worm) in less than 1 hour. Remember, this is OVER 56kbps GPRS.
Believe me. From personal experience I can attest that you dont have time to download the latest service pack before your machine is infected.
You may get lucky, but is all it is. LUCK.
If you are using a DSL connection and your machine is using a 192.x.x.x private IP address that could explain why you aren't getting an infection. Your DSL modem is essentially firewalling you.
Fortunately antivirus software cleaned up the mess with no loss of any data. (as far as I know).
"Oh noes! Why aren't we all doomed yet?! Is it because you don't know what the fuck you're talking about? It's not like there's a balance of power between all parties... and etc. Obvious."
a "balance" of power?
This "balance" as you call it certainly seems to result in a lot of oppression, death and human suffering. And there is no indication that human suffering is on the decline. No... there have been no genocides this year.
No.. Clinton did not fire ICBM's at a pharmaceutical factory (which was not producing any WMD) but was in fact the source of 50% of the low-cost medicine in a small third world country, which can not afford to import medicine from the west, and has subsequently resulted in the thousands of preventable deaths of innocent bystanders. A country which is not right now in the throws of a civil war.
No.. The Bush White House did not intentionally distort the truth in regards to the existence of WMD in Iraq or the "connection" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, who was no threat to the USA, but was a big threat to Saudi Aradian and Kuwaiti oil fields.
No.. The Reagan Administration did not provide financial support to terrorists in Nicaragua and obtain those funds by selling illegal arms to Iran.
No. George Bush senior did not lie to the American Public about the existence of 10s of thousands of Iraqi troops arrayed along the Iraqi border, in preparation to invade Saudi Arabia.
No... copyright durations have not been extended retroactively to 70 years after an authors death with out any compensation to the public good which is deprived of 20 years worth of material which the original authors created fully expecting the material to become public domain by now.
No... people are not being put in jail without a lawyer, without being charged and without any possibility of a hearing before a court except at the presidents whim.
And none of those non-existant people are ever tortured or have their genitals mutilated, nor are any murdered.
And absolutely no high level members of any organized crime families have any interest or controlling shares in in corporate America. Corporate america is too righteous to do business with the "criminals". Crime and greed just dont mix.
No american companies have been doing business with Iran in violation of international trade embargoes, and no american company would ever dream of exploiting child labour or taking advantage of non-existant or unenforced environmental protection laws in third world countries in order to increase profits.
And no one who would ever force 12 year olds to work 16 hour shifts on a factory floor for practically no pay, or dump tons of toxic waste into local water supplies.
And no.. the government never spends hundreds of millions of dollars bailing out bankrupt corporations which according to free market principles ought to be left to compete or fail on their own.
Pull your head out of your ass before you start accusing other people of ignorance.
For those you want to know how to use encrypted swap paritions on Linux here is how:
/dev/hdb as your swap partition (you can actually use any partition or even a flat file) then type:
/dev/loop0 /dev/hdb
/dev/loop0 doesn't work, try loop1 or loop2 etc. (you are looking for an unused loopback device. If you are already using loopback devices, then you probably already know how to do this stuff)
/dev/loop0
/dev/loop0
PS: Your computer will not operate any slower than when using plain swap. I kid you not.
PPS: this works in mandrake and suse.
make sure module cryptoloop is loaded:
> modprobe cryptoloop
assuming you want to use
>losetup -e aes256
if
you will be prompted for a passphrase. type lots of random characters (at least 20. the more the merrier). You don't need to remember it because you can use a different one each time you reboot. I like to click random keys on the keyboard for about 45 seconds.
then type
>mkswap
this formats the partition on the other side of the loopback device to be a swap file. (remember that loop0 is being encrypted prior to the data ever hitting the disk)
and then type
>swapon
this mounts the swap partition to be a swap file.
you now have an encrypted swap partition all mounted and available as virtual memory. Use 'top' to confirm this.
This swap will not automount at boot this way, unless you put the aforementioned steps into a boot script of some kind. You can deny it or make a script to do it for you. Just make sure you use a random key each time.
I have been using encrypted swap paritions for a few years and I'm never going back.
(hint you can also make encrypted volumns using almost the same steps)
The nifty thing is that since you don't know the keys you use for your swap parition you have plausible deniability.
Big Brother would prefer to have proof. It is a lot cleaner that way.
Most corporations are not yet big enough on their own to openly kill their "problems" and therefore can only achieve the ultimate solution by presenting proof to a court of law.
The courts of law still maintain the facade of justice (at least towards defendants with enough money to defend themselves completely). And generally in most public courts if you can provide irrefutable proof that a document can be easily forged, the court must demand some iota of evidence from the party presenting the document that this document is in fact what they purport it to be.
However documents which are digitally signed with keys that are only in the possession of the adverse party are pretty much presumed authentic. (by adverse party I mean the party which the evidence is being used against).
Publishing the encryption key as a matter of course is a good step in defeating this, as now all parties have access to the encryption keys. So the mere existence of a message encrypted with them doesn't itself prove who made the message.
(I didn't study the OTR algorithm carefully enough to understand how it prevents other parties from reading the messages after the fact.)
You seem to forget that corporations are often owned by many normal citizens like you and me along with a fair share of very rich citizens of course. Let's not forget this fact before we start villifying anything with word corporation in it.
"often owned by many normal citizens" perhaps.. but usually not. If you take any share chosen randomly and determine the owner, you will, much more often than not, find that it is owned by of the "fair share" of elite.
So please define your use of the term "fair share". The distribution of corporate ownership seems to defy any meaning of the term "fair share" that I know of.
Something is vile on its own merit. It doesn't matter if a small percentage of the corporation is owned by people who would be appalled and dismayed if they knew what they were a part of. The controlling share is owned by the elite.
But the problem is not merely one of unfair wealth distribution. Corporations routinely engage in practices which are despicable. And we allow it to continue out of fear that somehow doing good will "hurt business".
Rarely do we ask ourselves if something we do is going to hurt people. Presumably people can take care of themselves.. but business is a defenseless child we must nurture and love.
This is especially the governments duty. (how it became the governments duty.......... well.. business told us it was.)
I said: War should be waged because it is morally necessary.
you replied:
"Somebody else already responded with a similar message, but I also don't agree with your statement. War should be waged for reasons of SURVIVAL, not for any other reason."
Who's survival?
Your own? your family's? Your king's?
What do you mean by "survival?"
If you would be guaranteed "survival" by colabaration or surrender to a invading force, then you would advocate colabaration or surrender?
If you know that a war is morally necessary, and you do not go to war, then you are morally culpable for whatever evil occurs thereafter which that war would have prevented.
On the otherhand... I dont agree with the notion that you should go to war simply because the government or your boss tells you to. You must be personally convinced in the necessity, otherwise you are nothing more than a paid killer.
Yes, I see your point that it _should_ be based on morals only, but what kind of morals are we talking about? During the cold war, both US and USSR spent one helluva lot of money because they both wanted to save the world from the evils of either Communism or Democracy. If we accept your viewpoint, there is nothing to judge it by.
Actually... the USSR wanted to save the world from the evils of CAPITALISM. Capitalism is not democracy.
I believe it was american capitalists who coined the phrase "the evils of democracy".
The judgements ought to have been made BEFORE the cold war and during the cold war and without a profit motive.
However... if corporations may not profit from war, that would really cause corporations to consider wether they should encourage governments to wage it.
As for the morality of the war itself. That is something that human beings may judge and decide.
Corporations always vote in favour of profit.
That confounding profit factor ought to be eliminated from the equation of war.
The fact that most wars historically have been immoral does not change the fact that war ought to be moral.