He's overstating the case, but no theory is needed. The iTunes store consistently breaks even in the quarterly reports. It is an iPod, iPhone, and Mac promotional service.
So why does Apple sell DRM free music, and why does iTunes burn any music to totally DRM free CDs ?
Because that too helps promote said hardware sales. It is not that Apple will never license Fairplay. They may have to if their market share for portable digital players is deemed large enough. The point of making it specific to Apple (and the few other devices they've licensed it to including a few 3rd party phones) is to stop MS from embracing and then breaking it. If Apple licensed Fairplay, then MS would integrate it into Windows Media Player long enough to get most people switched over, then they'd start to break things or make things work more poorly than with other players giving iPods a bad reputation. It is their standard operating procedure.
My theory is that the iPod was originally a defensive move by Apple to stop MS from dominating digital music and locking out Macs from modern media. It succeeded much better than anticipated and now they're leveraging it against MS's takeovers of other markets. There may well come a time when it makes sense to license Fairplay, but only to companies MS cannot buy. Better yet, moving to open standards without DRM will condition users to not accept DRM'd files in the future and permanently stop MS from locking users in in that way.
Just render the mp3 to a wav file then encode it back to mp3. Presto, done.
Here's an even easier way, download it from a P2P network in the first place.
The RIAA still doesn't get it. People can already get this stuff for free. The question in the consumer's mind is would they rather make sure it is 100% legal, or would they rather the music was convenient, i.e. works everywhere on all devices and can be transferred between machines and will still work if you switch computers or reinstall your computer. WMA is too painful to use. Nice try though.
Companies drive me crazy when they do this, I mean punishing someone whose a potential consumer of your product makes so much sense... yeesh.
The thing you're missing is that Apple executives did not sit down and decide to make things hard for Linux users. Probably they sat down and looked for a way to stop MS from making WMP work with the iPod, since, MS uses similar lock in strategies against them in other markets every day. They were probably considering Sony and maybe Real. They may or may not have considered Linux at all and if they did they probably decided there were so few Linux users that the impact would not be as bad as letting MS leverage their monopolies to push Apple out of markets while not taking every effort to leverage their own near monopoly.
Normally I'd object pretty strongly to any sort of enforced tie ins like this, but when competing against MS and while it is clear the Justice department will do nothing to stop their abuses, Apple and all other companies competing with them are in a very bad spot. Two wrongs don't make a right, but anything that stops MS from becoming the sole gatekeeper for DRM and all media within the next decade sounds like something we really, really need. And make no mistake, if not for Apple's iPod and Apple leveraging it, WMP would be the format for almost all legal music on the internet and MS would be taking a cut of it and preparing to stop said music from playing on Linux and other OS's altogether
Also, I don't own an iPod and am pretty sure there will be a work around in short order.
Honda Accord outsells Chevrolet Corvette. Gasp? These are completely different markets. Mommies & their young children, one market. Teens and young adults, one market.
Your analogy is apt, but your statement is false. A lot of people are shopping for a gaming system for themselves and their kids and they're picking between the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS 3. It is the same market and unlike cars, you can't look at the number of seats or mileage before buying. Teens and young adults are also mommies these days. We're talking overlapping market segments, not separate market segments or different markets altogether. People are buying Wii who would otherwise be buying one of the other consoles.
I don't own any of the next generation consoles and I doubt I will for a long time. I have no bias coming into this. I'm not invested in trying to justify my expensive purchase. I've played on other people's systems a few times. Right now, the Wii seems the most fun to me and that is what I care about, but who knows what the future will bring.
And perhaps you should look at history, because what I am saying is that this is NOTHING NEW. 99% of the wealth has ALWAYS been in the hands of less than 1% of the population.
This is factually incorrect. The Gini coefficient is a measure of wealth disparity and in agrarian populations there tended to be significantly less wealth disparity than there is now. In fact, since the 50s as the US and China have both been becoming more and more industrialized, wealth disparity has been increasing in both countries, whereas in more progressive parts of Europe the rates have been declining. From a historical perspective, wealth disparity in the US hasn't been this bad since before the new deal.
Be it the emperor or the King and his friends, or the heads of large corporations. Or the small group of elite politicians in the so called "communist" states. You are just kidding yourself if you think it was ever any other way.
There has never been zero wealth disparity, nor will their ever be. So what? Wealth disparity is the most probable causative factor for increasing violent crime and for a violent overthrow of the existing government. Ignoring it is foolish. Looking to decrease it in order to make society better makes a lot of sense, especially when you target the unfair mechanisms of increasing wealth disparity, namely the wealth condensation effect from interest.
As production increases, the rich benefit most.
The amount the rich benefit is not really related to production levels. If the stock market crashes, the wealthy are in the best position to use their wealth to take advantage of other's misfortune and buy real estate and commodities. If the economy is strong and so is the stock market, the wealthiest collect the most interest by loaning money to those who want to do real work growing production levels.
Yeah, so the rich get richer. The poor are still slaves...
The rich get richer, compared to the median. Wealth is power. The more wealth disparity, the less power and more like slaves the rest of the people are.
But the poor today have public transport (and even vehicles).
They did back in the day too. It was called public roads and your feet. Some owned donkeys or camels or whatever. The interesting thing is, public transportation is government subsidized. In effect, it is socialism. Real socialism, not authoritarianism by the socialist party somewhere. Public transport is owned by "the people" and counts against wealth disparity. Every person owns a little bit of it.
The poor today are allowed to "own" their property.
I disagree with this. Most can't afford to own property and for those that can, eminent domain and property taxes mean they can never truly own it. You pay regularly or they take it from you.
They are allowed to travel, and they are allowed to do anything that the rich can do, provided they can afford it.
What a joke. The amount of money you have has a lot do do with what happens in the courtroom. See the drunken rich bimbo who crashed their car into someone this week and notice how much jail time they serve.
Now if they can't manage the little money they have and try to live beyond their means, then it's their own damned fault if they end up in a huge mess. A fool and his money are soon parted - be he RICH or POOR alike.
This is quite simply not true. You're trying to equate the system with a meritocracy, where the foolish will soon be poor. The problem is, it just isn't true. Wealthy or poor, the most likely deciding factor is not your wisdom, intelligence, work ethic, or genetics, it is who your parents were an how much money they give you. That is why wealth disparity is going out of control.
Linux distributions are far more guilty of bundling than Microsoft has ever been. Now if you want to talk product tying, you'd have to show me a component of Windows that can stand alone as a separate product, yet cannot be removed from Windows and replaced with a competitor's offering.
You're misusing your terms. Bundling is one form of tying, the first specifically exemplified in antitrust law. Tying products is not illegal. Tying markets is illegal if one of those markets is one you have monopoly influence in. Makers of Linux distributions can tie and bundle anything they want right up until they have a monopoly on one of those things.
Your argument is like saying, "The NRA member down the street is much more guilty of firing guns than the Virginia Tech murderer." What you're misunderstanding is what is illegal and why. Bundling is not illegal just as shooting guns is not illegal. Tying/bundling a monopolized product with an non-monopolized product from a existing, separate market is illegal, just as shooting guns at people is illegal.
And then you have 3 separate monopolies in each of desktop, internet, and office applications, since none of them would change their business practices as a result. Great idea.
You're assuming the company would be split along the product lines. A more reasonable solution is to split the company into competitors, giving several companies the rights to produce Windows using all the code and intellectual property to date.
No, the correct approach would have been to require Microsoft to disclose its secret file formats, network protocols, and APIs. The free market would do the rest of the work in cutting Microsoft down to size.
I disagree. Even if you managed to stop them from leveraging ties based upon formats and APIs, they could still leverage bundling (which they already do) and that would still undermine the other markets. Eventually I think any micromanagement of MS will fail. They have too much money fro bribes and too many well established business practices built on leveraging a monopoly. For a solution to work, MS must no longer have a monopoly. We already tried it the other way and the restrictions on APIs were watered down over and over again and MS and more of the people MS funded were elected. The feds admit MS is in violation of the agreement and has been for years, but nothing is done about it.
We'd be in a lot better situation if there were 3 MS's each with 1/3 of the money and each with incentive to out compete the others with better products.
Do you know what a "non sequitur" is? It is when you make a statement like "False" in response to my claim that monopolies undermine the free market, and then you follow that statement with more statements that in no way back up your argument.
Firstly you get the types of monopolies wrong. There are natural monopolies which result from natural phenomenon, such as geography and there are monopolies imposes by unnatural forces such as a law, a lock-in technology, or via bundling. Secondly, any monopoly can be abused to undermine a free market. Because of natural monopolies it is not illegal to obtain a monopoly in a market, merely to abuse it by undermining a second market using your first monopoly.
Lets look at an extreme example of a natural monopoly for the sake of clarity. Suppose a meteor falls to earth with strange properties we cannot duplicate and that meteor is owned by an individual whose property it landed on. Now suppose, by drinking water that has been mixed with a small amount of this meteor you could extend your life to double or triple its normal span. The man being the only source for this substance, has a natural monopoly which is perfectly legal and while it does not conform to normal free market behavior, does not undermine any market. The problem is when that monopoly is abused to affect other markets. Suppose, for example, The man refused to sell the magical water outright, but instead agreed to sell only an expensive lifestyle package including a mansion, 4 cars, 3 pets, a wardrobe of clothing, a small jet plane, and a yacht. Well since everyone who wants said water has to buy all of these things as well, the markets for these other things is undermined. Many sellers of luxury yachts might go out of business since everyone who can afford a yacht already has one from our monopolist. It does not matter if the yachts sold by our monopolist are somewhat inferior or even if they cost 10 times the price of a similar yacht. Because it is bundled it has broken the free market.
Any monopoly can be used to undermine other markets via tying including bundling, thus monopolies are restrained by the law from undermining other markets. Microsoft is the example of the day because they not only have several monopolies but are constantly abusing those monopolies to undermine more and more markets in blatant defiance of the law. Their entire business plan is built around breaking antitrust law for profit, then tying things up in court as long as possible, paying of politicians, and paying off the lawsuits from the small number of victims who have enough money to get their claims through the courts.
Thanks for the link, by the way, but I've already read Greenspan's commentary as well as more about monopolies than most people who are not economics majors. I understand them just fine, you simply failed to understand either what I was saying, or how it applied.
They don't give a damn if it's the best format or not; they want a monopoly enforced by law.
Do you even know what a monopoly is? By definition an open standard requirement removes the ability of a monopoly to undermine the market. MS could easily use ODF within their products, but they don't want a true open standard because they want to be able to abuse their monopoly more easily. All an open standard does is require each competitor to compete based upon the merits of their software, not on the fact that it is hard to switch to a competitor with an offering that is better for your needs. OOXML as evaluated by numerous parties does not meet those requirements. It refers to behaviors of closed and proprietary software within the so called spec making it impossible for anyone without the source to those programs to properly implement it. That is the opposite of "open." It provides only limited patent protection so that there is guarantee that much software can legally implement it and no guarantee that that software will be able to maintain backward compatibility with older versions of the spec (patent protection applies only to the most recent version).
I truly hope you're being paid to astroturf because the alternative is that their astroturfing is actually convincing people of such obviously absurd falsehoods.
Individual experience will vary. Did you buy all the machines at the same time for the same price? The point of objectively looking at reliability numbers is to see for a given price or for all prices, what percentage of machines break and brick and what percentage of service calls solve the problem. Several companies publish studies every year. The best of the lot, in my opinion, is Consumer Reports. They're funded by their subscribers and take no money or demo machines from companies, instead buying them as individuals from normal sources and relying upon survey data of consumers. They have a lot more data points than any individual and I generally find their numbers to agree with the numbers we track at work for our purchases. Apple is at the top of their lists, but because they offer no low end machines, that is to be expected. With Apple removed from the listing their overall ratings for desktops for 2006 placed eMachines at #1 with 62% and Gateway at #3 with 54%, making them a little better than average. For laptops Lenovo came in #1 with 69% , Toshiba came in at #2 with 57% and Gateway came in at #6 with 50%.
You are complaining about a process that subverts... well, what you want the outcome to be. But this democratic process subverts something else: market forces.
You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.
This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.
Seriously, Gateway has always made really crappy computers.
I've never purchased a Gateway, but I do follow the trends in reliability, price, performance, and support from major vendors. Objectively, Gateway has not "always" made crappy computers. Instead they followed a common trend in computer manufacturing/sales. Within the first few years they made quality machines and had excellent support, both better than average for the price. Then, when they had a reputation and brand, the company executives cashed it in for quick profit by selling machines made more cheaply and poorly and counting on their reputation to get people to buy. The exact same thing happened with Alienware about a year before Dell bought them.
Sometimes at a later date a company can reverse course to some degree. Dell's laptops, for example, have gained in quality and reliability over the last few years and are no longer the cheapest junk they can assemble using whatever is inexpensive today. Usually, however, with enough customers pissed off and vowing never to buy crap from Brand X again, it makes more sense in business to simply start Brand Y and count on consumers do not do any homework or even look at consumer reports instead of the TV ad where the guy says its a good deal.
To clarify, Adobe did EOL Framemaker and stopped supporting all but the Windows version. Then, they un-EOL'd Framemaker and are releasing a new version (Windows only). This new version is mostly fixes for flaws and deficiencies and is developed by a team outsourced to India who seem pretty clueless (I met a few of them while they were demoing the new version). I think they're responding to MadCap's new Blaze program which is being marketed as a direct competitor to Framemaker with all the features and a better UI engineered from the ground up. Sadly, neither MadCap nor Adobe seem interested in a non-Windows version.
Obviously their office suite will include that curiously often withheld feature, export to PDF.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. OpenOffice, WordPerfect, Everything on OS X, KWord, Google Docs, and AbiWord all support PDF export and more than half of them support PDF import. MS Word is the only one that does not support PDF export natively (because of antitrust issues).
They usually add their own format, for the same reasons MS invented its own: to lock you in to that app, even years after the reasons you originally used it might not have any value at all.
A lot of companies do this and Adobe may do it too. Or they could go with the ODF standard and capitalize upon all the other software that is already compatible with ODF.
They should all read/write both.doc and XML (with a public DTD and descriptive specs). Postscript/PDF would be nice, especially if Adobe lets people import PDF for editing.
I've never seen anything that forbids you writing a program that edits PDF files. The problem is, PDF is a format designed for print and portability, so it does not contain a lot of the information that is really, really useful for editing. PDF is a lot closer to a vector image than a word processing file and was not designed to be edited.
What we need is a standard, open storage/exchange format.
It's called ODF. It's supported by OpenOffice, IBM's Lotus suite, Apple's TextEdit, Google Docs and dozens of others. If Adobe is smart, they'll capitalize upon the popularity and make it the default format. If they insist upon a proprietary format, they probably will fail and even if they succeed we're not really a lot better off than we were.
f they are really smart... They will have a version for Window, Mac OS-X, and Linux.
If they are really smart they'll focus on Windows and OS X with support for MSOffice formats, but with the default format being ODF. Linux support would be a plus, but it will not make or break them and companies looking at the benefits of Linux are probably also looking at the cost benefits of Open Office. Any company looking at the office suite market has to decide how big of gamble to take. They can try to go for a proprietary lock-in and become the new MS of the market, or they can try to kill MS's stranglehold and have a chunk of the now healthy and competitive market. The latter is a lot easier to pull off and capitalizes on the help of other players, like Sun, Apple, Google, IBM, and Corel. It is also not going to net them as large of profits. If Adobe gambles big on this one, they might pull it off, but I doubt it.
Full disclosure results in announcing a bug not to the world, but only to people that are paying attention.
Yes, but the group that is paying attention includes the people with the greatest need to maintain security.
The "I want to do bad things" community has the information and is paying attention. Their community gets advance information before there even is a fix and they get to evaluate if it is worth their efforts to exploit it.
True, although sometimes this community already knows some of it.
The other group that gets to benefit from full disclosure is the media. Starved for news of any sort, bad news is certainly good news for them.
This is a good thing. First it informs the people. Second, it gives people a bad impression of vendors who have security holes and encourages them to move to more secure vendors. That's the free market improving security.
All in all, full disclosure is simply blackmail.
Nope. Offering to not release the vulnerability for cash is blackmail.
Unfortunately, no matter what the result is the user of the product affected gets all of the negative attributes.
Look, I'm a huge advocate of responsible disclosure. Sometimes immediate disclosure is the best option. Some companies don't see security as a concern at all. They ignore any bugs you submit to them and don't bother trying to prevent new ones. The best you can do in some of those cases is immediate, partial disclosure. For other cases, where there are better alternatives to the software in question or a work around, is immediate full disclosure. Eventually the company will lose enough customers because of it so that they reform or have too few customers to cause a large problem anymore.
I agree with you that litigation for damages is not a good way to clean up the problems. The real problem is lack of competition for the free market to deal with the problem. Legislation encouraging or even mandating open standards for file formats and protocols and cleaning up the travesty that is Microsoft's ongoing illegal actions would be the best way to fix the security problem in software today.
I take it that you have never owned a business or participated in the owner ship of one.
Actually, I've done both.
This is probably going to hard for you to understand but there is a degree of separability from action I'm not directly connected with.
Your degree of responsibility, however, corresponds with your degree of involvement. If you're profiting from actions, you're partially responsible.
If I loan you money for whatever reason and you ignore that reason and decide to buy a gun ad go killing people, Should I be just as responsible as you?
Of course not. If, however, you loan me money for a gun, knowing I'm likely to do something criminal with it, and you charge me interest on that loan, then you may well be guilty of conspiracy. Your analogy does not apply because shareholders can vote on the actions of the corporation, and because shareholders profit from the actions of the corporation.
Unless you took part in something illegal, why should you be held for someone else's actions?
So when the italian mob boss tells Vinnie to whack the old lady and gives him 5 grand, the mob boss should not be held partially responsible for that crime? What if he just tells Vinnie to make sure nobody who saw anything talks and Vinnie kills the old lady? Did the mob boss have reason to believe Vinnie was going to commit criminal acts?
Whether or not something is illegal or not, is not the same thing as if something should be legal. Right now, corporate shareholders may be completely in the clear legally, despite profiting from and possibly encouraging criminal acts, but that does not mean that should be the case and there i no natural right to be protected as you previously claimed.
There is a fundemental necessity to form a corporation.
No, there is a practical benefit to the economy and thus society for the existence of corporations, but corporations also cause a lot of misery for society. The balance of how many rights individuals should be able to transfer to a corporation and how many legal responsibilities shareholders bear for the actions of that corporations, are simply a proctical matter and they should be adjusted to whatever benefits society the most.
You working for a company for profit has the same connections as a person investing in the company for profit.
This is only true if you are in a position to make decisions for that company, in ways that cause illegal acts. For example, if you're paid to staple papers and you are given an hourly wage, you have no ability to determine if the company does or does not hire the Yakuza to kill a competitor. You don't directly profit by that act. If, on the other hand, you are a shareholder and the CEO you hired does this, and you pay him bonuses for how much the company earns, then you've just given that CEO the incentive to kill people, by paying them for it. If one CEO is caught, you hire a new one. What motivation is there for the company to stop doing it and for you to stop hiring people you know have mob connections and will act accordingly?
Without protecting investers and owners of corporations, the entire world would be set back i don't know how many years.
Did I argue against protecting investors? I argued that the amount of protection given to investors should correlate with the amount of control over their investment they cede to society. This is a simple matter of rights and responsibility, just as I first said, and as I said, you don't seem to understand the relationship.
In an agrarian culture, a two-stroke engine can perform useful work.
Suppose you live in an agrarian culture. You probably can't afford a two stroke engine, but even assuming you have one and can keep it running, you can't make much of a living. You see, the US subsidizes their farmers to produce a surplus, and they do so pretty cheaply since they have the money to invest in technology to start with, decreasing the overall cost. That American (and other first world) is too cheap for you to compete with so you, like most of your neighbors, are forced to give up farming and your farm is taken for taxes by your government. Now you're basically homeless and surviving on foreign aid.
Since those foreigners supplying the aid are bright and hi-tech, they realize that just shipping food and supplies is just exacerbating this problem, but what else can be done? The cost to build the infrastructure to create and maintain all the technology needed to compete, even without subsidized competitors, is incredibly expensive. So those people providing aid look for a labor intensive field, with a much smaller required technology infrastructure, so they can provide a sustainable way to help others. Computer networks have globalized the world. With computers and networks and some training, why a destitute child in the third world could make a lot of money (relative to their neighbors). Why pay an American big money to proofread your Website and find broken links, when an African will do it for 1/100th the cost?
OLPC is about moving away from being an agrarian society, since being a cost effective one is not economically viable. It is about moving towards a content generation, and computer skills based society, much like the US is becoming. It is ambitious, but I don't think it is unfeasible.
Corporations aren't entities of their own They are extensions of their owners and carry the same rights of their owners. They are treated like separate entities because with silent owners, there needs to be a way to protect their interest while shielding them from actions caused by the company but not by their direction.
I don't think you understand the relationship between rights and responsibilities. You state that there must be a way for people exercise their rights, while being protected from the liability, but if you're profiting from actions, then you are partially responsible for those actions. I don't see it as a given that investors should not lose rights in correspondence with their lack of responsibility for the actions of their agents.
It is impossible to escape that and still live in a free society.
There is no fundamental right to form a corporation and be protected from responsibility from crimes committed by your employees, for your profit. It might make sense economically, in some ways, but only with corresponding limitations imposed upon those groups of employees, since we're no longer discussing fundamental freedoms, but artificial restrictions and benefits designed to engineer a common good. While individual investors should of course have all natural human rights, corporations should only have such rights as benefit the common good.
That same cop that is infringing on your "right" to speed by hitting you with radar and fining you for having jammers is also the same cop that pushes you to the ground and takes a bullet for you when someone decides to hold up the convenience store. Guess what, even off duty, cops frequently wind up doing their job in emergency situations like this because that is what they were trained to do.
Umm, I'm not sure you understand what you're talking about. Cops are in a dangerous profession, and sometimes their actions designed to insure their own safety are misinterpreted. That has nothing to do with and does not justify police who abuse their position and commit crimes, which in my experience, is all of them. Ever met a cop who did not speed in a non emergency situation? Ever met a cop who did not pull someone over because of some non-illegal thing about them that they wanted to punish?
It is not a cop's job to take a bullet for you and they very rarely do so. Usually they get shot at when they try to arrest someone, not when they try to stop a crime in action. In many cases it is official procedure when approaching the scene of a shooting, to wait a set period of time to give the shooter time to flee before they enter the scene, minimizing danger to the officers at the possible expense of the lives of citizens.
Hell, next time you see a cop, go ask them if a cop will show up to protect you if someone tries to shoot you. I think they show up to intervene in a crime in something like 1% of violent crimes where 911 is called. The cop will tell you to have a gun and defend yourself and the courts and reality are backing him up. He has no legal obligation to enforce the law or stop crime or protect citizens and usually he will not.
The solution is to fix the clowns and quit bitching about the people who are ultimately the few that are willing to make sacrifices for others which is rare enough, but they are also willing to potentially sacrifice their lives, which in our whiney self serving culture is all but nonexistant.
The solution is to fix the system that hires the people who are many of our current police, and to hold them accountable for their crimes to a greater extent than normal citizens. Cops are granted the right to stop and detain and give orders to people and force them to obey using a gun. One near me was fired after it was discovered he had been using that authority to force men and women to have sex with him at gunpoint in local parks. His crime spree had been ongoing for years. In my opinion any cop who breaks the law using his uniform and badge should be convicted of the additional crime of abusing authority and given several years in jail and forbidden from ever serving in any police force or owning a firearm ever again. Any police officer convicted of a violent crime off duty should be fired and forbidden from serving on any police force.
You claim people should have more respect for police. I say police should be more respectable. In some cities up to 40% of the on duty police force has had a domestic violence complaint brought against them by a family member. Here's a quote from a Los Angeles report, "Victims of domestic violence committed by police officers frequently fear that the perpetrator will not be held accountable for the violence. Unfortunately, this fear is well-founded. A study of all completed Internal Affairs investigations from 1991 to 1997 of officers of the Los Angeles Police Department accused of domestic violence concluded that the discipline imposed was "exceedingly light," the "investigations lacked objectivity or were otherwise flawed or skewed," and "the Department should have presented many more internal investigations to Los Angeles prosecuting agencies.""
Until the police are held accountable for their crimes to the same extent as normal citizens and until they are effectively punished for abusing their positions there is good reason for people to fear them and fail to respect them.
That's only true to an extent and only true for very specific crimes (ie. relatively low level theft).
Looking at things objectively, the number one, worldwide, most direct correlation with the rates of violent crime and theft is... wealth disparity. That is to say, how much difference is their between what the wealthiest people in a society are making and what the poorest people are making. Now that is not the same thing as comfort and contentment, but it is not completely separate from it either. Other very strong correlations include decriminalization of drugs, socialized drug treatment programs, and socialized healthcare.
Anyone serious about decreasing the amount of serious crime in the US should be looking at these things as their most likely means of affecting change. Sadly, most people don't understand statistics, don't look into the facts, and are emotionally invested in the subject one way or another. Most politicians are a lot more interested in addressing volatile, divisive issues they can use to make people emotional and get votes.
Politicians and people address the issue of gun availability, because it plays on people's fear, fear of being shot and fear of not being able to defend oneself. In truth, statistically, gun availability has little or no correlation with violent crime and in studies of changes using gun control laws the best numbers indicate such laws tend to increase violent crime by a very slim amount, barely within statistical significance.
Politicians address fighting the drug culture, but all they do is swell prison populations with mostly nonviolent offenders, with absurdly disparate results depending on race, thus increasing disparity and crime. Statistically, draconian drug laws increase violent crime.
Legal measures that have great benefits for crime rates in the US, usually come about for completely different reasons. Legalized abortion, was the last such measure. It was pushed through with a combination of women's rights, and a strong campaign from the right that it would stop minorities from breeding and "taking over" the US from the white majority. Studies of its affects seem to indicate that it turned around the ever increasing crime rates in the US by preventing the birth of people who would coincidentally be the highest risk candidates for becoming criminals (mostly poor, many minorities, unwanted by parents, or single or underage parents).
The next such legislation that is being discussed in the US right now is socialized healthcare. It is being pushed for a lot of reasons having to do with the US's overall health problems compared to other industrialized nations and the relatively high prices we pay. Mostly, however, it is being pushed on emotion, with pictures of sick and dying children and firefighters and elderly people. Implemented correctly (a big if) it could also do more to reduce disparity between the poor and the rich, and reduce the amount of desperation and justification people feel. This would be a big step towards reducing crime, but the link is a little to indirect for most people to see it, so it will never be implement based upon that criteria.
cop work is one of the most criticized, and yet at the same time vital, aspects of modern life
Cop work is criticized because when it is abused, it is one of the most damaging and dangerous aspects of our society, and it is abused every day by a large number of cops.
and yet a cop is the first person these same people will call upon and depend upon if they are ever victimized or robbed.
Police intervene in time to prevent a crime in only a few percent of all crimes. Most of the time, they don't even investigate robberies. If you're robbed you call them and hope you have insurance.If someone attacks you, you fight them or shoot them, and call the police afterwards so that they don't come for you when the body is found.
i'm not asking your paranoid distrustful hollywood-addled alter ego, i'm asking your cognitive ability to look at and perceive the reality of actual police work
I know a lot of cops. My brother was a cop before he went into the private sector. Every cop I know has a "funny" story about abusing their power, most of them not even realizing that their story is about abuse of power. They don't even think about it that way. The problem is incredibly widespread.
it must be so thankless being a cop. you're there to protect people, and all they can do is reflexively depart negativity at you
Make no mistake. The police mandate is to punish, not to protect. They have no legal responsibility to protect the people and most cops if asked, will tell you you should have a gun and protect yourself. Legally, the police can willfully ignore a crime in progress even if they claim they are going to respond and even when this results in people being beaten and repeatedly raped while occasionally sneaking a phone call to the police who then ignore them.
Being a cop has plenty of perqs. You can usually break the law with impunity, and many of them do. Not that it is all roses, but most of the people I know who became cops did so because they like having power over others. I've heard more than one police officer say they became a cop because they wanted to be able to shoot someone without going to jail.
humanity sucks. you are all so ungrateful
I'm grateful to the few cops I know who really try to do the right thing, although I disagree with many of their opinions as to what the "right thing" is. At the same time I recognize that our law enforcement system is seriously broken and many people are rightly critical of the police. The system lends itself to abuse and recruits people likely to commit abuses. As citizens we should all look critically at our government and be on guard against abuses. The police is simply on branch of government where that abuse has direct and dire consequences to average citizens.
Stealing corporate secrets is only wrong if they are under copyright or you've signed some sort of NDA.
Wrong? That is a subjective term. Revealing trade secrets is illegal in most of the US under most situations. Copyright and NDA's don't have anything to do with the legality.
A person's decision to uphold the rights of others should never hinge on whether you like them, agree with their politics, or the actions they have taken outside of the issue at hand. It shouldn't matter whether they are a big fish or a small fry. Rights must be universal.
Well, this is sort of true. Rights should be applied universally and equitably to all people, and maybe even to some degree to animals. We're talking, however, about the rights of a corporation. A corporation is not a person, it is a legal construct and legitimacy of a corporations' rights are very much a point of debate. The legitimacy of the right to a trade secret is likewise a matter of debate. Do I have a right to stop a person who finds out one of my secrets from exercising their freedom of speech and telling others? If my girlfriend tells you that I'm willing to take $20 for the book I have on Ebay, even though I'm asking $100 and you post that information here on Slashdot, should I legally be able to force Slashdot to reveal your identity to me, so I can bring a lawsuit against you? Legally, I probably do have that right, but I'm not sure ethically or morally that I should have that right.
Slashdot Mirror
He's overstating the case, but no theory is needed. The iTunes store consistently breaks even in the quarterly reports. It is an iPod, iPhone, and Mac promotional service.
So why does Apple sell DRM free music, and why does iTunes burn any music to totally DRM free CDs ?Because that too helps promote said hardware sales. It is not that Apple will never license Fairplay. They may have to if their market share for portable digital players is deemed large enough. The point of making it specific to Apple (and the few other devices they've licensed it to including a few 3rd party phones) is to stop MS from embracing and then breaking it. If Apple licensed Fairplay, then MS would integrate it into Windows Media Player long enough to get most people switched over, then they'd start to break things or make things work more poorly than with other players giving iPods a bad reputation. It is their standard operating procedure.
My theory is that the iPod was originally a defensive move by Apple to stop MS from dominating digital music and locking out Macs from modern media. It succeeded much better than anticipated and now they're leveraging it against MS's takeovers of other markets. There may well come a time when it makes sense to license Fairplay, but only to companies MS cannot buy. Better yet, moving to open standards without DRM will condition users to not accept DRM'd files in the future and permanently stop MS from locking users in in that way.
Here's an even easier way, download it from a P2P network in the first place.
The RIAA still doesn't get it. People can already get this stuff for free. The question in the consumer's mind is would they rather make sure it is 100% legal, or would they rather the music was convenient, i.e. works everywhere on all devices and can be transferred between machines and will still work if you switch computers or reinstall your computer. WMA is too painful to use. Nice try though.
The thing you're missing is that Apple executives did not sit down and decide to make things hard for Linux users. Probably they sat down and looked for a way to stop MS from making WMP work with the iPod, since, MS uses similar lock in strategies against them in other markets every day. They were probably considering Sony and maybe Real. They may or may not have considered Linux at all and if they did they probably decided there were so few Linux users that the impact would not be as bad as letting MS leverage their monopolies to push Apple out of markets while not taking every effort to leverage their own near monopoly.
Normally I'd object pretty strongly to any sort of enforced tie ins like this, but when competing against MS and while it is clear the Justice department will do nothing to stop their abuses, Apple and all other companies competing with them are in a very bad spot. Two wrongs don't make a right, but anything that stops MS from becoming the sole gatekeeper for DRM and all media within the next decade sounds like something we really, really need. And make no mistake, if not for Apple's iPod and Apple leveraging it, WMP would be the format for almost all legal music on the internet and MS would be taking a cut of it and preparing to stop said music from playing on Linux and other OS's altogether
Also, I don't own an iPod and am pretty sure there will be a work around in short order.
Your analogy is apt, but your statement is false. A lot of people are shopping for a gaming system for themselves and their kids and they're picking between the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS 3. It is the same market and unlike cars, you can't look at the number of seats or mileage before buying. Teens and young adults are also mommies these days. We're talking overlapping market segments, not separate market segments or different markets altogether. People are buying Wii who would otherwise be buying one of the other consoles.
I don't own any of the next generation consoles and I doubt I will for a long time. I have no bias coming into this. I'm not invested in trying to justify my expensive purchase. I've played on other people's systems a few times. Right now, the Wii seems the most fun to me and that is what I care about, but who knows what the future will bring.
One option is Titan TV listings. They are free (add supported) via a Web interface and are designed to work with PVR devices.
This is factually incorrect. The Gini coefficient is a measure of wealth disparity and in agrarian populations there tended to be significantly less wealth disparity than there is now. In fact, since the 50s as the US and China have both been becoming more and more industrialized, wealth disparity has been increasing in both countries, whereas in more progressive parts of Europe the rates have been declining. From a historical perspective, wealth disparity in the US hasn't been this bad since before the new deal.
Be it the emperor or the King and his friends, or the heads of large corporations. Or the small group of elite politicians in the so called "communist" states. You are just kidding yourself if you think it was ever any other way.There has never been zero wealth disparity, nor will their ever be. So what? Wealth disparity is the most probable causative factor for increasing violent crime and for a violent overthrow of the existing government. Ignoring it is foolish. Looking to decrease it in order to make society better makes a lot of sense, especially when you target the unfair mechanisms of increasing wealth disparity, namely the wealth condensation effect from interest.
As production increases, the rich benefit most.The amount the rich benefit is not really related to production levels. If the stock market crashes, the wealthy are in the best position to use their wealth to take advantage of other's misfortune and buy real estate and commodities. If the economy is strong and so is the stock market, the wealthiest collect the most interest by loaning money to those who want to do real work growing production levels.
Yeah, so the rich get richer. The poor are still slaves...The rich get richer, compared to the median. Wealth is power. The more wealth disparity, the less power and more like slaves the rest of the people are.
But the poor today have public transport (and even vehicles).They did back in the day too. It was called public roads and your feet. Some owned donkeys or camels or whatever. The interesting thing is, public transportation is government subsidized. In effect, it is socialism. Real socialism, not authoritarianism by the socialist party somewhere. Public transport is owned by "the people" and counts against wealth disparity. Every person owns a little bit of it.
The poor today are allowed to "own" their property.I disagree with this. Most can't afford to own property and for those that can, eminent domain and property taxes mean they can never truly own it. You pay regularly or they take it from you.
They are allowed to travel, and they are allowed to do anything that the rich can do, provided they can afford it.What a joke. The amount of money you have has a lot do do with what happens in the courtroom. See the drunken rich bimbo who crashed their car into someone this week and notice how much jail time they serve.
Now if they can't manage the little money they have and try to live beyond their means, then it's their own damned fault if they end up in a huge mess. A fool and his money are soon parted - be he RICH or POOR alike.This is quite simply not true. You're trying to equate the system with a meritocracy, where the foolish will soon be poor. The problem is, it just isn't true. Wealthy or poor, the most likely deciding factor is not your wisdom, intelligence, work ethic, or genetics, it is who your parents were an how much money they give you. That is why wealth disparity is going out of control.
You're misusing your terms. Bundling is one form of tying, the first specifically exemplified in antitrust law. Tying products is not illegal. Tying markets is illegal if one of those markets is one you have monopoly influence in. Makers of Linux distributions can tie and bundle anything they want right up until they have a monopoly on one of those things.
Your argument is like saying, "The NRA member down the street is much more guilty of firing guns than the Virginia Tech murderer." What you're misunderstanding is what is illegal and why. Bundling is not illegal just as shooting guns is not illegal. Tying/bundling a monopolized product with an non-monopolized product from a existing, separate market is illegal, just as shooting guns at people is illegal.
You're assuming the company would be split along the product lines. A more reasonable solution is to split the company into competitors, giving several companies the rights to produce Windows using all the code and intellectual property to date.
No, the correct approach would have been to require Microsoft to disclose its secret file formats, network protocols, and APIs. The free market would do the rest of the work in cutting Microsoft down to size.I disagree. Even if you managed to stop them from leveraging ties based upon formats and APIs, they could still leverage bundling (which they already do) and that would still undermine the other markets. Eventually I think any micromanagement of MS will fail. They have too much money fro bribes and too many well established business practices built on leveraging a monopoly. For a solution to work, MS must no longer have a monopoly. We already tried it the other way and the restrictions on APIs were watered down over and over again and MS and more of the people MS funded were elected. The feds admit MS is in violation of the agreement and has been for years, but nothing is done about it.
We'd be in a lot better situation if there were 3 MS's each with 1/3 of the money and each with incentive to out compete the others with better products.
Do you know what a "non sequitur" is? It is when you make a statement like "False" in response to my claim that monopolies undermine the free market, and then you follow that statement with more statements that in no way back up your argument.
Firstly you get the types of monopolies wrong. There are natural monopolies which result from natural phenomenon, such as geography and there are monopolies imposes by unnatural forces such as a law, a lock-in technology, or via bundling. Secondly, any monopoly can be abused to undermine a free market. Because of natural monopolies it is not illegal to obtain a monopoly in a market, merely to abuse it by undermining a second market using your first monopoly.
Lets look at an extreme example of a natural monopoly for the sake of clarity. Suppose a meteor falls to earth with strange properties we cannot duplicate and that meteor is owned by an individual whose property it landed on. Now suppose, by drinking water that has been mixed with a small amount of this meteor you could extend your life to double or triple its normal span. The man being the only source for this substance, has a natural monopoly which is perfectly legal and while it does not conform to normal free market behavior, does not undermine any market. The problem is when that monopoly is abused to affect other markets. Suppose, for example, The man refused to sell the magical water outright, but instead agreed to sell only an expensive lifestyle package including a mansion, 4 cars, 3 pets, a wardrobe of clothing, a small jet plane, and a yacht. Well since everyone who wants said water has to buy all of these things as well, the markets for these other things is undermined. Many sellers of luxury yachts might go out of business since everyone who can afford a yacht already has one from our monopolist. It does not matter if the yachts sold by our monopolist are somewhat inferior or even if they cost 10 times the price of a similar yacht. Because it is bundled it has broken the free market.
Any monopoly can be used to undermine other markets via tying including bundling, thus monopolies are restrained by the law from undermining other markets. Microsoft is the example of the day because they not only have several monopolies but are constantly abusing those monopolies to undermine more and more markets in blatant defiance of the law. Their entire business plan is built around breaking antitrust law for profit, then tying things up in court as long as possible, paying of politicians, and paying off the lawsuits from the small number of victims who have enough money to get their claims through the courts.
Thanks for the link, by the way, but I've already read Greenspan's commentary as well as more about monopolies than most people who are not economics majors. I understand them just fine, you simply failed to understand either what I was saying, or how it applied.
Do you even know what a monopoly is? By definition an open standard requirement removes the ability of a monopoly to undermine the market. MS could easily use ODF within their products, but they don't want a true open standard because they want to be able to abuse their monopoly more easily. All an open standard does is require each competitor to compete based upon the merits of their software, not on the fact that it is hard to switch to a competitor with an offering that is better for your needs. OOXML as evaluated by numerous parties does not meet those requirements. It refers to behaviors of closed and proprietary software within the so called spec making it impossible for anyone without the source to those programs to properly implement it. That is the opposite of "open." It provides only limited patent protection so that there is guarantee that much software can legally implement it and no guarantee that that software will be able to maintain backward compatibility with older versions of the spec (patent protection applies only to the most recent version).
I truly hope you're being paid to astroturf because the alternative is that their astroturfing is actually convincing people of such obviously absurd falsehoods.
Individual experience will vary. Did you buy all the machines at the same time for the same price? The point of objectively looking at reliability numbers is to see for a given price or for all prices, what percentage of machines break and brick and what percentage of service calls solve the problem. Several companies publish studies every year. The best of the lot, in my opinion, is Consumer Reports. They're funded by their subscribers and take no money or demo machines from companies, instead buying them as individuals from normal sources and relying upon survey data of consumers. They have a lot more data points than any individual and I generally find their numbers to agree with the numbers we track at work for our purchases. Apple is at the top of their lists, but because they offer no low end machines, that is to be expected. With Apple removed from the listing their overall ratings for desktops for 2006 placed eMachines at #1 with 62% and Gateway at #3 with 54%, making them a little better than average. For laptops Lenovo came in #1 with 69% , Toshiba came in at #2 with 57% and Gateway came in at #6 with 50%.
You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.
This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.
I've never purchased a Gateway, but I do follow the trends in reliability, price, performance, and support from major vendors. Objectively, Gateway has not "always" made crappy computers. Instead they followed a common trend in computer manufacturing/sales. Within the first few years they made quality machines and had excellent support, both better than average for the price. Then, when they had a reputation and brand, the company executives cashed it in for quick profit by selling machines made more cheaply and poorly and counting on their reputation to get people to buy. The exact same thing happened with Alienware about a year before Dell bought them.
Sometimes at a later date a company can reverse course to some degree. Dell's laptops, for example, have gained in quality and reliability over the last few years and are no longer the cheapest junk they can assemble using whatever is inexpensive today. Usually, however, with enough customers pissed off and vowing never to buy crap from Brand X again, it makes more sense in business to simply start Brand Y and count on consumers do not do any homework or even look at consumer reports instead of the TV ad where the guy says its a good deal.
To clarify, Adobe did EOL Framemaker and stopped supporting all but the Windows version. Then, they un-EOL'd Framemaker and are releasing a new version (Windows only). This new version is mostly fixes for flaws and deficiencies and is developed by a team outsourced to India who seem pretty clueless (I met a few of them while they were demoing the new version). I think they're responding to MadCap's new Blaze program which is being marketed as a direct competitor to Framemaker with all the features and a better UI engineered from the ground up. Sadly, neither MadCap nor Adobe seem interested in a non-Windows version.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. OpenOffice, WordPerfect, Everything on OS X, KWord, Google Docs, and AbiWord all support PDF export and more than half of them support PDF import. MS Word is the only one that does not support PDF export natively (because of antitrust issues).
A lot of companies do this and Adobe may do it too. Or they could go with the ODF standard and capitalize upon all the other software that is already compatible with ODF.
They should all read/write bothI've never seen anything that forbids you writing a program that edits PDF files. The problem is, PDF is a format designed for print and portability, so it does not contain a lot of the information that is really, really useful for editing. PDF is a lot closer to a vector image than a word processing file and was not designed to be edited.
What we need is a standard, open storage/exchange format.It's called ODF. It's supported by OpenOffice, IBM's Lotus suite, Apple's TextEdit, Google Docs and dozens of others. If Adobe is smart, they'll capitalize upon the popularity and make it the default format. If they insist upon a proprietary format, they probably will fail and even if they succeed we're not really a lot better off than we were.
If they are really smart they'll focus on Windows and OS X with support for MSOffice formats, but with the default format being ODF. Linux support would be a plus, but it will not make or break them and companies looking at the benefits of Linux are probably also looking at the cost benefits of Open Office. Any company looking at the office suite market has to decide how big of gamble to take. They can try to go for a proprietary lock-in and become the new MS of the market, or they can try to kill MS's stranglehold and have a chunk of the now healthy and competitive market. The latter is a lot easier to pull off and capitalizes on the help of other players, like Sun, Apple, Google, IBM, and Corel. It is also not going to net them as large of profits. If Adobe gambles big on this one, they might pull it off, but I doubt it.
Yes, but the group that is paying attention includes the people with the greatest need to maintain security.
The "I want to do bad things" community has the information and is paying attention. Their community gets advance information before there even is a fix and they get to evaluate if it is worth their efforts to exploit it.True, although sometimes this community already knows some of it.
The other group that gets to benefit from full disclosure is the media. Starved for news of any sort, bad news is certainly good news for them.This is a good thing. First it informs the people. Second, it gives people a bad impression of vendors who have security holes and encourages them to move to more secure vendors. That's the free market improving security.
All in all, full disclosure is simply blackmail.Nope. Offering to not release the vulnerability for cash is blackmail.
Unfortunately, no matter what the result is the user of the product affected gets all of the negative attributes.Look, I'm a huge advocate of responsible disclosure. Sometimes immediate disclosure is the best option. Some companies don't see security as a concern at all. They ignore any bugs you submit to them and don't bother trying to prevent new ones. The best you can do in some of those cases is immediate, partial disclosure. For other cases, where there are better alternatives to the software in question or a work around, is immediate full disclosure. Eventually the company will lose enough customers because of it so that they reform or have too few customers to cause a large problem anymore.
I agree with you that litigation for damages is not a good way to clean up the problems. The real problem is lack of competition for the free market to deal with the problem. Legislation encouraging or even mandating open standards for file formats and protocols and cleaning up the travesty that is Microsoft's ongoing illegal actions would be the best way to fix the security problem in software today.
Actually, I've done both.
This is probably going to hard for you to understand but there is a degree of separability from action I'm not directly connected with.Your degree of responsibility, however, corresponds with your degree of involvement. If you're profiting from actions, you're partially responsible.
If I loan you money for whatever reason and you ignore that reason and decide to buy a gun ad go killing people, Should I be just as responsible as you?Of course not. If, however, you loan me money for a gun, knowing I'm likely to do something criminal with it, and you charge me interest on that loan, then you may well be guilty of conspiracy. Your analogy does not apply because shareholders can vote on the actions of the corporation, and because shareholders profit from the actions of the corporation.
Unless you took part in something illegal, why should you be held for someone else's actions?So when the italian mob boss tells Vinnie to whack the old lady and gives him 5 grand, the mob boss should not be held partially responsible for that crime? What if he just tells Vinnie to make sure nobody who saw anything talks and Vinnie kills the old lady? Did the mob boss have reason to believe Vinnie was going to commit criminal acts?
Whether or not something is illegal or not, is not the same thing as if something should be legal. Right now, corporate shareholders may be completely in the clear legally, despite profiting from and possibly encouraging criminal acts, but that does not mean that should be the case and there i no natural right to be protected as you previously claimed.
There is a fundemental necessity to form a corporation.No, there is a practical benefit to the economy and thus society for the existence of corporations, but corporations also cause a lot of misery for society. The balance of how many rights individuals should be able to transfer to a corporation and how many legal responsibilities shareholders bear for the actions of that corporations, are simply a proctical matter and they should be adjusted to whatever benefits society the most.
You working for a company for profit has the same connections as a person investing in the company for profit.This is only true if you are in a position to make decisions for that company, in ways that cause illegal acts. For example, if you're paid to staple papers and you are given an hourly wage, you have no ability to determine if the company does or does not hire the Yakuza to kill a competitor. You don't directly profit by that act. If, on the other hand, you are a shareholder and the CEO you hired does this, and you pay him bonuses for how much the company earns, then you've just given that CEO the incentive to kill people, by paying them for it. If one CEO is caught, you hire a new one. What motivation is there for the company to stop doing it and for you to stop hiring people you know have mob connections and will act accordingly?
Without protecting investers and owners of corporations, the entire world would be set back i don't know how many years.Did I argue against protecting investors? I argued that the amount of protection given to investors should correlate with the amount of control over their investment they cede to society. This is a simple matter of rights and responsibility, just as I first said, and as I said, you don't seem to understand the relationship.
Suppose you live in an agrarian culture. You probably can't afford a two stroke engine, but even assuming you have one and can keep it running, you can't make much of a living. You see, the US subsidizes their farmers to produce a surplus, and they do so pretty cheaply since they have the money to invest in technology to start with, decreasing the overall cost. That American (and other first world) is too cheap for you to compete with so you, like most of your neighbors, are forced to give up farming and your farm is taken for taxes by your government. Now you're basically homeless and surviving on foreign aid.
Since those foreigners supplying the aid are bright and hi-tech, they realize that just shipping food and supplies is just exacerbating this problem, but what else can be done? The cost to build the infrastructure to create and maintain all the technology needed to compete, even without subsidized competitors, is incredibly expensive. So those people providing aid look for a labor intensive field, with a much smaller required technology infrastructure, so they can provide a sustainable way to help others. Computer networks have globalized the world. With computers and networks and some training, why a destitute child in the third world could make a lot of money (relative to their neighbors). Why pay an American big money to proofread your Website and find broken links, when an African will do it for 1/100th the cost?
OLPC is about moving away from being an agrarian society, since being a cost effective one is not economically viable. It is about moving towards a content generation, and computer skills based society, much like the US is becoming. It is ambitious, but I don't think it is unfeasible.
I don't think you understand the relationship between rights and responsibilities. You state that there must be a way for people exercise their rights, while being protected from the liability, but if you're profiting from actions, then you are partially responsible for those actions. I don't see it as a given that investors should not lose rights in correspondence with their lack of responsibility for the actions of their agents.
It is impossible to escape that and still live in a free society.There is no fundamental right to form a corporation and be protected from responsibility from crimes committed by your employees, for your profit. It might make sense economically, in some ways, but only with corresponding limitations imposed upon those groups of employees, since we're no longer discussing fundamental freedoms, but artificial restrictions and benefits designed to engineer a common good. While individual investors should of course have all natural human rights, corporations should only have such rights as benefit the common good.
Umm, I'm not sure you understand what you're talking about. Cops are in a dangerous profession, and sometimes their actions designed to insure their own safety are misinterpreted. That has nothing to do with and does not justify police who abuse their position and commit crimes, which in my experience, is all of them. Ever met a cop who did not speed in a non emergency situation? Ever met a cop who did not pull someone over because of some non-illegal thing about them that they wanted to punish?
It is not a cop's job to take a bullet for you and they very rarely do so. Usually they get shot at when they try to arrest someone, not when they try to stop a crime in action. In many cases it is official procedure when approaching the scene of a shooting, to wait a set period of time to give the shooter time to flee before they enter the scene, minimizing danger to the officers at the possible expense of the lives of citizens.
Hell, next time you see a cop, go ask them if a cop will show up to protect you if someone tries to shoot you. I think they show up to intervene in a crime in something like 1% of violent crimes where 911 is called. The cop will tell you to have a gun and defend yourself and the courts and reality are backing him up. He has no legal obligation to enforce the law or stop crime or protect citizens and usually he will not.
The solution is to fix the clowns and quit bitching about the people who are ultimately the few that are willing to make sacrifices for others which is rare enough, but they are also willing to potentially sacrifice their lives, which in our whiney self serving culture is all but nonexistant.The solution is to fix the system that hires the people who are many of our current police, and to hold them accountable for their crimes to a greater extent than normal citizens. Cops are granted the right to stop and detain and give orders to people and force them to obey using a gun. One near me was fired after it was discovered he had been using that authority to force men and women to have sex with him at gunpoint in local parks. His crime spree had been ongoing for years. In my opinion any cop who breaks the law using his uniform and badge should be convicted of the additional crime of abusing authority and given several years in jail and forbidden from ever serving in any police force or owning a firearm ever again. Any police officer convicted of a violent crime off duty should be fired and forbidden from serving on any police force.
You claim people should have more respect for police. I say police should be more respectable. In some cities up to 40% of the on duty police force has had a domestic violence complaint brought against them by a family member. Here's a quote from a Los Angeles report, "Victims of domestic violence committed by police officers frequently fear that the perpetrator will not be held accountable for the violence. Unfortunately, this fear is well-founded. A study of all completed Internal Affairs investigations from 1991 to 1997 of officers of the Los Angeles Police Department accused of domestic violence concluded that the discipline imposed was "exceedingly light," the "investigations lacked objectivity or were otherwise flawed or skewed," and "the Department should have presented many more internal investigations to Los Angeles prosecuting agencies.""
Until the police are held accountable for their crimes to the same extent as normal citizens and until they are effectively punished for abusing their positions there is good reason for people to fear them and fail to respect them.
Looking at things objectively, the number one, worldwide, most direct correlation with the rates of violent crime and theft is... wealth disparity. That is to say, how much difference is their between what the wealthiest people in a society are making and what the poorest people are making. Now that is not the same thing as comfort and contentment, but it is not completely separate from it either. Other very strong correlations include decriminalization of drugs, socialized drug treatment programs, and socialized healthcare.
Anyone serious about decreasing the amount of serious crime in the US should be looking at these things as their most likely means of affecting change. Sadly, most people don't understand statistics, don't look into the facts, and are emotionally invested in the subject one way or another. Most politicians are a lot more interested in addressing volatile, divisive issues they can use to make people emotional and get votes.
Politicians and people address the issue of gun availability, because it plays on people's fear, fear of being shot and fear of not being able to defend oneself. In truth, statistically, gun availability has little or no correlation with violent crime and in studies of changes using gun control laws the best numbers indicate such laws tend to increase violent crime by a very slim amount, barely within statistical significance.
Politicians address fighting the drug culture, but all they do is swell prison populations with mostly nonviolent offenders, with absurdly disparate results depending on race, thus increasing disparity and crime. Statistically, draconian drug laws increase violent crime.
Legal measures that have great benefits for crime rates in the US, usually come about for completely different reasons. Legalized abortion, was the last such measure. It was pushed through with a combination of women's rights, and a strong campaign from the right that it would stop minorities from breeding and "taking over" the US from the white majority. Studies of its affects seem to indicate that it turned around the ever increasing crime rates in the US by preventing the birth of people who would coincidentally be the highest risk candidates for becoming criminals (mostly poor, many minorities, unwanted by parents, or single or underage parents).
The next such legislation that is being discussed in the US right now is socialized healthcare. It is being pushed for a lot of reasons having to do with the US's overall health problems compared to other industrialized nations and the relatively high prices we pay. Mostly, however, it is being pushed on emotion, with pictures of sick and dying children and firefighters and elderly people. Implemented correctly (a big if) it could also do more to reduce disparity between the poor and the rich, and reduce the amount of desperation and justification people feel. This would be a big step towards reducing crime, but the link is a little to indirect for most people to see it, so it will never be implement based upon that criteria.
Cop work is criticized because when it is abused, it is one of the most damaging and dangerous aspects of our society, and it is abused every day by a large number of cops.
and yet a cop is the first person these same people will call upon and depend upon if they are ever victimized or robbed.Police intervene in time to prevent a crime in only a few percent of all crimes. Most of the time, they don't even investigate robberies. If you're robbed you call them and hope you have insurance.If someone attacks you, you fight them or shoot them, and call the police afterwards so that they don't come for you when the body is found.
i'm not asking your paranoid distrustful hollywood-addled alter ego, i'm asking your cognitive ability to look at and perceive the reality of actual police workI know a lot of cops. My brother was a cop before he went into the private sector. Every cop I know has a "funny" story about abusing their power, most of them not even realizing that their story is about abuse of power. They don't even think about it that way. The problem is incredibly widespread.
it must be so thankless being a cop. you're there to protect people, and all they can do is reflexively depart negativity at youMake no mistake. The police mandate is to punish, not to protect. They have no legal responsibility to protect the people and most cops if asked, will tell you you should have a gun and protect yourself. Legally, the police can willfully ignore a crime in progress even if they claim they are going to respond and even when this results in people being beaten and repeatedly raped while occasionally sneaking a phone call to the police who then ignore them.
Being a cop has plenty of perqs. You can usually break the law with impunity, and many of them do. Not that it is all roses, but most of the people I know who became cops did so because they like having power over others. I've heard more than one police officer say they became a cop because they wanted to be able to shoot someone without going to jail.
humanity sucks. you are all so ungratefulI'm grateful to the few cops I know who really try to do the right thing, although I disagree with many of their opinions as to what the "right thing" is. At the same time I recognize that our law enforcement system is seriously broken and many people are rightly critical of the police. The system lends itself to abuse and recruits people likely to commit abuses. As citizens we should all look critically at our government and be on guard against abuses. The police is simply on branch of government where that abuse has direct and dire consequences to average citizens.
Wrong? That is a subjective term. Revealing trade secrets is illegal in most of the US under most situations. Copyright and NDA's don't have anything to do with the legality.
A person's decision to uphold the rights of others should never hinge on whether you like them, agree with their politics, or the actions they have taken outside of the issue at hand. It shouldn't matter whether they are a big fish or a small fry. Rights must be universal.Well, this is sort of true. Rights should be applied universally and equitably to all people, and maybe even to some degree to animals. We're talking, however, about the rights of a corporation. A corporation is not a person, it is a legal construct and legitimacy of a corporations' rights are very much a point of debate. The legitimacy of the right to a trade secret is likewise a matter of debate. Do I have a right to stop a person who finds out one of my secrets from exercising their freedom of speech and telling others? If my girlfriend tells you that I'm willing to take $20 for the book I have on Ebay, even though I'm asking $100 and you post that information here on Slashdot, should I legally be able to force Slashdot to reveal your identity to me, so I can bring a lawsuit against you? Legally, I probably do have that right, but I'm not sure ethically or morally that I should have that right.