Don't confuse the law with the facts. Monsanto's legal 'personhood' means it can hold title to property, take on debt, and be a party to contracts.
There are also plenty of ways in which corporations _aren't_ treated as persons. In particular, they _can't_ be subject to the same punishments as people--how do you send a corporation to prison? Even a fine imposed on a corporation is really a fine on its investors, employees, and customers.
Which gets to the root of my complaint against the corporation "taking responsibility for this mess". Ultimately, the corporation _can't_ take responsibility. Forcing 'Monsanto' to clean up Anniston would impose the cleanup costs on three groups of people: Monsanto's current stockholders, current employees, and customers. But the people who _created_ the mess--a small group of employees and ex-employees--pay almost nothing.
Now, the argument can be made that that small group of employees and ex-employees doesn't have the billion dollars or so that it would take to clean up the pollution. Therefore, we're going after Monsanto's investors, employees, and customers, simply because they have more money. Well, why stop there? Why not impose some of the cost on, say, Larry Ellison? He certainly has the money.
If the perpetrators of the dumping can't cover the whole cleanup cost, the taxpayers should pay the rest of it--but only after the responsible persons have been sued into utter poverty.
As for the relevance of any of this to Monsanto's current GM food research, the consensus seems to be that it speaks to Monsanto's credibility. I would argue that, whatever U.S. law may say, corporations are _not_ persons in the sense of having moral qualities such as honesty and integrity. Therefore, trying to assess their 'credibility' is a mistake. The statements of a corporation, on GM food or pollution or any other subject, are ultimately statements of people within the corporation. They should be evaluated individually.
I'm sorry, but what's the relevance of this to Monsanto's GM crops?
Sure, it's important for its own sake. The people at Monsanto who did these tests and realized that they were dumping dangerous levels of PCBs and didn't do anything about it should be held responsible. They should be criminally prosecuted if possible.
But the people who are working with GM foods today are, for the most part, a different set of people. There's no point in blaming them for what other people within the organization called 'Monsanto' did.
There is no 'Monsanto'. It's just a large group of individuals getting together and coordinating some of their actions. Giving the organization a name is convenient for them, and occasionally convenient for their critics, but it doesn't shift moral responsibility from the people who poisoned Anniston to anyone else.
No, interference between frequencies does _not_ create a third frequency. What it creates is a more complex wave pattern. How this shows up depends on your equipment. If you're looking at the signal with an oscilloscope, you'll see a complex wave pattern. If you use a spectrum analyzer, you'll see two peaks.
The human eye uses chemical receptors that pick up a range of frequencies centered at a particular 'peak' frequency. Most of us (disregarding tetrachromatic and colorblindness mutations) have three types of receptors for that: red, blue, green.
If the eye receives both blue and green light, both sets of receptors respond, according to the relative intensities of the two lights. If the eye receives a pure frequency of light _between_ blue and green, both sets of receptors will _also_ respond, according to how close it is to the blue and green that the receptors are tuned for. Two lights of different colors can stimulate the eye in the same way as a single light of only one color.
White light can be a mixture of all frequencies (like blackbody radiation), or a mixture of only three frequencies that equally stimulate all three receptors.
No, there is one distinction that is entirely warranted:
"Someone has information about me because I chose to give it to him"
versus
"Someone has information about me that I didn't choose to give"
See, you have a choice. You can choose not to give information about yourself. There are tradeoffs--some people might not deal with you because of this--but this is self-limiting; if you refuse to buy a product from anyone who wants your telephone number, you're creating an untapped market, and untapped markets attract suppliers.
Katz confuses these categories by going from wiretapping to credit histories to giving your phone number at Radio Shack in the same breath. I think he's doing it deliberately, so that he can scoop up the deservedly bad reputation of wiretapping and smear it all over Radio Shack.
Tapping my phone lines, bugging my home, looking through my windows with a telescope--those are _involuntary_ privacy violations. I have no choice about participating in those things. (Ironically (but predictably), the European countries Katz applauds, where citizens "own their own data", typically have less protection against this kind of intrusion than the U.S.)
This also applies to trading information that wasn't supposed to be traded--I made a choice based on a claim that my information wouldn't be given away, and that claim turned out to be a lie. It's fraud. There are laws against fraud. There are courts that enforce the laws against fraud. We don't need a new system of laws and Privacy Führers to prevent a specific kind of fraud.
It seems that Katz's diatribe against "privacy invasion" is an indirect attack on another target: "unaccountable institutions" that "make decisions that affect our personal, financial, and work lives." This is his problem--he doesn't like institutions that aren't 'accountable', which he defines in terms of elections and public referenda. Katz demands that no one be allowed to do anything that 'affects' him in any way without submitting it to a vote.
The practical problem (I'll leave the ethical problems alone for the moment) with his little statist fantasy is that historically, the free market has been much better at enforcing accountability than _any_ government, elected or otherwise. Politicians lie; businesses have to deliver, or their competitors will.
If Katz wants to criticize the free market, he should do it honestly instead of disguising his argument as concern for our privacy.
Go on, Katz, say it: "Workers of the world, unite!" And if you're not going to say it, shut the hell up.
> Which version of the Christian moral code? is the right one.
Well, Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God", and the second is to "love your neighbor as yourself". That's what really matters: do as you would have done to you. If this sounds like basic common-sense ethics, that's because God designed us to function best under His policies.
"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." (Gal. 5)
> Tonnes of Christians do believe in a literal > hell, where they believe a lot of people who I > dont think deserve it are going. You cannot > dispute that and the > but-they're-not-real-Christians thing is not an > appropriate response.
As the old Catholic hymn puts it, "They'll know we are Christians by our love." I don't know whether these people are Christians or not, but if they don't demonstrate the love of Jesus, they're not good examples of what Jesus is about.
Anyway, believing in a literal hell is not the same as believing that anyone who sins will end up there.
Paul: "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."
Jesus: "I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly."
> The Christian churches are human-run > organizations that are ultimately responsible > for their actions. > Attempting to implement Communist theory led to > the abuses in the Soviet system. > Attempting to implement Christian theory led to > the abuses of the various Christian systems. > You can't just say well those weren't really > communist/christian actions. You may be > literally correct but the movements' *actual* > results in human society are how things worked > out.
Any idea can be badly implemented. The question is whether we are trying to judge the Christian *faith* as such or the Christian *movement* throughout history.
The Christian movement gets a B+ for the first few centuries (after the departure of Jesus; all that raising-the-dead stuff in the first few years gets an A), and an F from Constantine on. (Note that the Christian church didn't start getting ugly until it got involved in politics. Maybe there's a lesson to the modern church here.)
The Christian faith gets an A, unless you want to be A*n R*nd and claim that Jesus taught evil moral beliefs like 'compassion' and 'generosity'.
> Mna is not *flawed* by the way. (More Chrsitian > promotion of self-hatred). Man makes mistakes.
The Christian faith doesn't promote 'self-hatred'. (Are we ignoring all that stuff about being created in the image of God, about being adopted as children of God, about being representatives of Christ in the world?)
> Man does evil things. But we must always strive > to pick ourselves back up collectively and learn > from those mistakes and go forward. Being bound
Fine. "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." So pick yourself back up *individually* and go forward.
> by a rigid paternalistic moral code isn't going > to help anything (except if you're the elite
No kidding. "Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?... All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.' Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because 'the righteous will live by faith.'... Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law."
The problem that we've had with patents so far is that they're exclusive. The open source community designs things and doesn't patent them because it wants to share them openly. So the first proprietary interest that comes along can in theory grab up the patent rights and lock us out of things that we invented.
RMS designed the GPL to 'hoard' software just like any other software license would, but the GPL requires that it be 'hoarded' by the General Public instead of by one powerful corporation. He took copyright laws that are intended to protect proprietary interests and used them to protect the public interest.
We could do something similar with patents: promote a 'Patent General Public License' that would be written into patents (or simply applied by the patent holder) and would mark the invention as owned by the inventor (as all patents do) but available for use, modification, and redistribution by the general public, as the GPL does. In fact, the PGPL could require (in the case of software patents) that all implementations of the patented technology be released under the GPL.
Armed with something like that, open-source developers could grab up the patent rights to hundreds of technologies, PGPL them, and then enforce the patents to keep them from being used in proprietary products.
The great thing about this is that a patent protects a *technology*, not an implementation. So if the proprietary developers want to use our technologies, they can't make the end product proprietary. They have three options:
1. Start developing free products. That's what we want, of course.
2. Put the patented part of the product in a separate 'module', which they would have to distribute on a free (i.e. GPL) basis. The rest of the product could remain proprietary. This is almost as good as (1).
3. Use a different technology. This is a patent, not a copyright, so they can't just reimplement our stuff. They have to find a totally different way to do what they're trying to do, or leave it out entirely. The idea of cutting out functionality should be scary enough that most companies will choose (1) or (2) and write lots of free software to make their own products work.
The difference is that Netscape intended to open up the *next* version of their browser, and keep developing it. That's why they put so much effort into mozilla.org: because it was part of a product line that they were still developing.
Normally, when a software company abandons a product, nobody ever sees the code again. If Qualcomm is really considering dropping the Eudora product line, they have no more use for the code. At that point, it's better for them to throw it to the wind and let *someone* find a use for it than to bury it. They don't have to manage the future development that may occur with the code.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't confuse the law with the facts. Monsanto's legal 'personhood' means it can hold title to property, take on debt, and be a party to contracts.
There are also plenty of ways in which corporations _aren't_ treated as persons. In particular, they _can't_ be subject to the same punishments as people--how do you send a corporation to prison? Even a fine imposed on a corporation is really a fine on its investors, employees, and customers.
Which gets to the root of my complaint against the corporation "taking responsibility for this mess". Ultimately, the corporation _can't_ take responsibility. Forcing 'Monsanto' to clean up Anniston would impose the cleanup costs on three groups of people: Monsanto's current stockholders, current employees, and customers. But the people who _created_ the mess--a small group of employees and ex-employees--pay almost nothing.
Now, the argument can be made that that small group of employees and ex-employees doesn't have the billion dollars or so that it would take to clean up the pollution. Therefore, we're going after Monsanto's investors, employees, and customers, simply because they have more money. Well, why stop there? Why not impose some of the cost on, say, Larry Ellison? He certainly has the money.
If the perpetrators of the dumping can't cover the whole cleanup cost, the taxpayers should pay the rest of it--but only after the responsible persons have been sued into utter poverty.
As for the relevance of any of this to Monsanto's current GM food research, the consensus seems to be that it speaks to Monsanto's credibility. I would argue that, whatever U.S. law may say, corporations are _not_ persons in the sense of having moral qualities such as honesty and integrity. Therefore, trying to assess their 'credibility' is a mistake. The statements of a corporation, on GM food or pollution or any other subject, are ultimately statements of people within the corporation. They should be evaluated individually.
I'm sorry, but what's the relevance of this to Monsanto's GM crops?
Sure, it's important for its own sake. The people at Monsanto who did these tests and realized that they were dumping dangerous levels of PCBs and didn't do anything about it should be held responsible. They should be criminally prosecuted if possible.
But the people who are working with GM foods today are, for the most part, a different set of people. There's no point in blaming them for what other people within the organization called 'Monsanto' did.
There is no 'Monsanto'. It's just a large group of individuals getting together and coordinating some of their actions. Giving the organization a name is convenient for them, and occasionally convenient for their critics, but it doesn't shift moral responsibility from the people who poisoned Anniston to anyone else.
No, interference between frequencies does _not_ create a third frequency. What it creates is a more complex wave pattern. How this shows up depends on your equipment. If you're looking at the signal with an oscilloscope, you'll see a complex wave pattern. If you use a spectrum analyzer, you'll see two peaks.
The human eye uses chemical receptors that pick up a range of frequencies centered at a particular 'peak' frequency. Most of us (disregarding tetrachromatic and colorblindness mutations) have three types of receptors for that: red, blue, green.
If the eye receives both blue and green light, both sets of receptors respond, according to the relative intensities of the two lights. If the eye receives a pure frequency of light _between_ blue and green, both sets of receptors will _also_ respond, according to how close it is to the blue and green that the receptors are tuned for. Two lights of different colors can stimulate the eye in the same way as a single light of only one color.
White light can be a mixture of all frequencies (like blackbody radiation), or a mixture of only three frequencies that equally stimulate all three receptors.
No, there is one distinction that is entirely warranted:
"Someone has information about me because I chose to give it to him"
versus
"Someone has information about me that I didn't choose to give"
See, you have a choice. You can choose not to give information about yourself. There are tradeoffs--some people might not deal with you because of this--but this is self-limiting; if you refuse to buy a product from anyone who wants your telephone number, you're creating an untapped market, and untapped markets attract suppliers.
Katz confuses these categories by going from wiretapping to credit histories to giving your phone number at Radio Shack in the same breath. I think he's doing it deliberately, so that he can scoop up the deservedly bad reputation of wiretapping and smear it all over Radio Shack.
Tapping my phone lines, bugging my home, looking through my windows with a telescope--those are _involuntary_ privacy violations. I have no choice about participating in those things. (Ironically (but predictably), the European countries Katz applauds, where citizens "own their own data", typically have less protection against this kind of intrusion than the U.S.)
This also applies to trading information that wasn't supposed to be traded--I made a choice based on a claim that my information wouldn't be given away, and that claim turned out to be a lie. It's fraud. There are laws against fraud. There are courts that enforce the laws against fraud. We don't need a new system of laws and Privacy Führers to prevent a specific kind of fraud.
It seems that Katz's diatribe against "privacy invasion" is an indirect attack on another target: "unaccountable institutions" that "make decisions that affect our personal, financial, and work lives." This is his problem--he doesn't like institutions that aren't 'accountable', which he defines in terms of elections and public referenda. Katz demands that no one be allowed to do anything that 'affects' him in any way without submitting it to a vote.
The practical problem (I'll leave the ethical problems alone for the moment) with his little statist fantasy is that historically, the free market has been much better at enforcing accountability than _any_ government, elected or otherwise. Politicians lie; businesses have to deliver, or their competitors will.
If Katz wants to criticize the free market, he should do it honestly instead of disguising his argument as concern for our privacy.
Go on, Katz, say it: "Workers of the world, unite!" And if you're not going to say it, shut the hell up.
> Which version of the Christian moral code? is the right one.
... All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.' Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because 'the righteous will live by faith.' ... Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law."
Well, Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God", and the second is to "love your neighbor as yourself". That's what really matters: do as you would have done to you. If this sounds like basic common-sense ethics, that's because God designed us to function best under His policies.
"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." (Gal. 5)
> Tonnes of Christians do believe in a literal
> hell, where they believe a lot of people who I
> dont think deserve it are going. You cannot
> dispute that and the > but-they're-not-real-Christians thing is not an
> appropriate response.
As the old Catholic hymn puts it, "They'll know we are Christians by our love." I don't know whether these people are Christians or not, but if they don't demonstrate the love of Jesus, they're not good examples of what Jesus is about.
Anyway, believing in a literal hell is not the same as believing that anyone who sins will end up there.
Paul: "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."
Jesus: "I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly."
> The Christian churches are human-run
> organizations that are ultimately responsible
> for their actions.
> Attempting to implement Communist theory led to
> the abuses in the Soviet system.
> Attempting to implement Christian theory led to
> the abuses of the various Christian systems.
> You can't just say well those weren't really
> communist/christian actions. You may be
> literally correct but the movements' *actual*
> results in human society are how things worked
> out.
Any idea can be badly implemented. The question is whether we are trying to judge the Christian *faith* as such or the Christian *movement* throughout history.
The Christian movement gets a B+ for the first few centuries (after the departure of Jesus; all that raising-the-dead stuff in the first few years gets an A), and an F from Constantine on. (Note that the Christian church didn't start getting ugly until it got involved in politics. Maybe there's a lesson to the modern church here.)
The Christian faith gets an A, unless you want to be A*n R*nd and claim that Jesus taught evil moral beliefs like 'compassion' and 'generosity'.
> Mna is not *flawed* by the way. (More Chrsitian
> promotion of self-hatred). Man makes mistakes.
The Christian faith doesn't promote 'self-hatred'. (Are we ignoring all that stuff about being created in the image of God, about being adopted as children of God, about being representatives of Christ in the world?)
> Man does evil things. But we must always strive
> to pick ourselves back up collectively and learn
> from those mistakes and go forward. Being bound
Fine. "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." So pick yourself back up *individually* and go forward.
> by a rigid paternalistic moral code isn't going
> to help anything (except if you're the elite
No kidding. "Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?
That's an interesting idea.
The problem that we've had with patents so far is that they're exclusive. The open source community designs things and doesn't patent them because it wants to share them openly. So the first proprietary interest that comes along can in theory grab up the patent rights and lock us out of things that we invented.
RMS designed the GPL to 'hoard' software just like any other software license would, but the GPL requires that it be 'hoarded' by the General Public instead of by one powerful corporation. He took copyright laws that are intended to protect proprietary interests and used them to protect the public interest.
We could do something similar with patents: promote a 'Patent General Public License' that would be written into patents (or simply applied by the patent holder) and would mark the invention as owned by the inventor (as all patents do) but available for use, modification, and redistribution by the general public, as the GPL does. In fact, the PGPL could require (in the case of software patents) that all implementations of the patented technology be released under the GPL.
Armed with something like that, open-source developers could grab up the patent rights to hundreds of technologies, PGPL them, and then enforce the patents to keep them from being used in proprietary products.
The great thing about this is that a patent protects a *technology*, not an implementation. So if the proprietary developers want to use our technologies, they can't make the end product proprietary. They have three options:
1. Start developing free products. That's what we want, of course.
2. Put the patented part of the product in a separate 'module', which they would have to distribute on a free (i.e. GPL) basis. The rest of the product could remain proprietary. This is almost as good as (1).
3. Use a different technology. This is a patent, not a copyright, so they can't just reimplement our stuff. They have to find a totally different way to do what they're trying to do, or leave it out entirely. The idea of cutting out functionality should be scary enough that most companies will choose (1) or (2) and write lots of free software to make their own products work.
The difference is that Netscape intended to open up the *next* version of their browser, and keep developing it. That's why they put so much effort into mozilla.org: because it was part of a product line that they were still developing.
Normally, when a software company abandons a product, nobody ever sees the code again. If Qualcomm is really considering dropping the Eudora product line, they have no more use for the code. At that point, it's better for them to throw it to the wind and let *someone* find a use for it than to bury it. They don't have to manage the future development that may occur with the code.