Your first point, I'm not going to argue on, because I don't know of the cases you're referring to. I assume here you mean recent ones? Perhaps you could cite examples.
Your second point - it is actually quite cheap, if you look at the whole picture, both the initial outlay and the ongoing cost. And it is relatively clean - the public likes to drum up the fears about nuclear waste, but the actual amount of waste is considerably less than that from the coal industry. A few pounds of nuclear material is enough to power a small city for a year. You compare that to the amount of coal you have to burn, and hundreds of metric tonnes of resulting pollution.
And assuming you find safe ways of getting it out of the way, it doesn't pollute the air and contribute to lung cancer. France themselves are leading pioneering research in recycling/reprocessing their nuclear waste. In the US, I believe there's a moratorium on reprocessing dating from the Carter Era, over fears that widespread proliferation of such technology might make it easy for terrorists to get nuclear weapons.
Your third point - that's the current situation. Isn't the whole point of this article to try and look as possibly increasing that percentage?
Fourth - as mentioned above, there's a massive outlay, obviously. It's not like you're just digging up rocks from the ground and burning them in a giant pit. And also, I think you're being a bit disingenious and selective with the facts here - the government also funds the coal industry...lol....and to a much larger amount. E.g. see this earlier story, when they were up in arms, when the Congress-funded U.S. Export-Import Bank denied them several hundred million dollars in loan guarantees:
Actually, BP, as an entity can be held liable, in the sense that it can be fined, or have extra regulatory controls imposed it. So that part at least isn't true.
And in fact, they could go further, and impose penalties on the board itself, if say, they were found to have acted fraudently. IANAL, of course.
However, this is all contingent on there actually being wrongdoing. You refer, for example to "justice".
Also, you claim that they were negligent. That remains to be seen - and I assume it will be proven one way or another in a court of law.
Obama's grand-standing aside - which to an Australian, just seemed like a bit of empty populist posturing, to try and score cheap political points - we don't yet know the full story.
At issue is whether they were say, just very unlucky, or whether there was actually say, criminal intent here. I somehow doubt it's at either end of that scale, and it probably lies somewhere in-between.
If you think of them as rational actors, it might seem plausible that they knew of the risk, but perhaps an engineer or manager screwed up the probabilities somewhere, and the precautions they took were inadequate. That, or they did calculate the risks correctly, but they were just unlucky, and well, s*it happens. Of course, they doesn't mean they're off scotch-free, as they still have to clean up their mess - after all, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place if they hadn't drilled at all, unlucky or not.
However, if it was just bad luck, then we can argue they should clean up their mess, it does limit the sort of holier-than-thou moral attacks we can pile on them. It's a bit like say, somebody in a car hits somebody. Now if aforesaid drive is doped up on illicit substances and driving unlicensed, or even decided to purposely run somebody over just for fun, then we can definitely say, that's quite a morally bad thing to do.
On the other hand, if it's just a freak accident, then well, it sucks, and it is their fault in a sense, but we wouldn't be as quick to judge. Once again, IANAL, but I'm fairly sure our legal system differentiates between the two cases, as well as in terms of intent.
If however, say somewhere in between those two extremes, and say, the driver was neglicient in their vehicle maintenance, and skipped a few service visits, or is just having a bad day (*cough* Tiger Woods*) and in good judgment shouldn't have been driving, then I'm sure we wouldn't be hard, as least morally, on them.
At the end of the day, I don't think there's any grand conspiracy going on, and I'm sure BP wants this mess cleaned up as quickly as anybody else - probably more. Hopefully our justice system will soon sort out exactly what happened, and ensure something on this magnitude doesn't occur again.
Also, I think you just discovered irony. You complain that I add noise - assumably because I don't agree with your particular point of view.
Yet your entire post didn't actually have any arguments, or indeed anything on-topic about the BP disaster - which is what we're meant to be talking to. It was basically a roundabout way of saying "Boo hoo, I don't agree with you, shut up, I'm taking my toys and going home".
You're on Slashdot. You use computers and electricity. Sorry, fail there.
And hydroelectric generation also causes vast environmental damage.
Go talk to Bob Brown, leader of the Greens party here in Australia about that...lol (he campaigned against a dam here in Tasmania).
I assume you live in some kind of permanent dwelling, as opposed to say, a cave or a tent? Yeah, impact there.
Fact of the matter is, you can try to mitigate it - e.g. I ride a bike around, I use energy-saving products, I recycle or reduce etc., but at the end of the day, we as humans, are having a major impact on the environment. We should take steps to reduce it, but it's something we have to deal with, at least if we want to keep our current lifestyles.
The only way to change that would probably be to drastically reduce our population (say, kill around 4-5 billion of us off?), and/or go back to a subsistence lifestyle, where we're at the mercy of predators, nature etc.
You're making up some stupid strawman fallacy here.
My objection is to people who jump up and down screaming corporations are evil. They're not - they're just legal entities. It's like saying a car is evil because it kills people.
And it's not about putting forth strong opinions, as you say, lol. I'd have no objections to that. You can say, well, the BP management didn't do the right thing here, they didn't put enough contingencies, didn't clean it up in a timely manner etc.
(Although I might remind you that in the last 100 years, I think we've have err...two BOP disasters, including this one? So why it may have been lax, you can't really blame them for not thinking it would happen.).
However, to use this as a chance to get on your soapbox, and cry CAPITALISM IS EVIL, UP WITH STALIN! is just pure idiocy.
I have my doubts that BP "knew" of the problem, in the sense that you're inferring. It may have been a possibility, but somebody, an engineer somebody, weighed up the risks. Either way, it'll all come out in the wash. I'm not entirely sure how if this was say, a communist society, and the government was running this, things would be any different.
Would the government somehow magically have invested in better engineering, and not had any bureaucratic bungles? Cause gosh, we know the government is ever so efficient at managing large-scale projects in a timely and economical manner...
In Australia, we've got Bob Brown, leader of the Greens Party.
Now, ideologically, I've got a lot against extremist environmentalists like him.
However, I admire and respect the guy for standing up for what he believes. Last time I checked, I believe he lives on his own (or with his male partner) in Tasmania - which is as remote in Australia as you can get =). And I think I read in an interview that he lives quite simply, in a shack-ish sort of place, close to nature, no utilities etc.
Either way, I think he's wacked off, but I can respect that he's prepared to stick to his guns, and suffer for what he believes in (in this case the environment).
You compare that against the idiotic faux-greenies we have here in Sydney, driving their over-sized 4WD's, living in their McMansions, and sipping their $6 lattes - and complaining about OH GOSH, WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS ENVIRONMENT ISSUE. IT'S JUST TRAGIC, I TELL YOU.
About the only thing they do is lobby about airport noise, or about building new roads through their areas, because it'll decrease the value of their property.
Ok, you're an idiot - corporations, or companies, or whatever, are *just a legal construct*. They're how our economy works. What do you think entrepeneurship is about? The small business around your corner, or the sandwich shop, they're also companies - so if you say COMPANIES ARE EVIL!!!! then friendly Bob around the corner who runs your local milk-bar is also one of these aforesaid evil people.
I suggest you go take a basic course in economics 101. We're essentially a capitalistic society, tempered by government control for externalities (i.e. to protect the environment, ensure minimum wages etc.).
If you don't have private corporations, you have what, exactly - government run companies? Lol. Gee, we saw how well that worked in USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK etc. Even China, once the last bastion of communism, basically went capitalistic in the 1980's, under Deng Xiao Ping.
Look, communism failed, ok, and it's pretty much a joke in the real world. Maybe in some dream world where everybody is altruistic, but it just doesn't work in our fallen world.
There isn't an alterantive to it, that we know of yet. You're right that we should have controls.
However, then you make idiotic statements like "limit their growth", or "they aren't needed". You seem to have very little understanding of how a modern economy functions, or what things like efficient allocation of resources means.
And I'm not American, so my American history is patchy, but this is the first I've heard of the founding fathers wanting to outlaw capitalism? They were communists? First I've heard of that - can any other American back that up?
Corporations aren't "worse" for people, or anything like that. Occasionally (or often, depending on your POV), management of these companies may make bad decisions. But that's just like Bob your local hardware store can make a bad decision, or you or I can make a bad decision. It's not the company, it's the people who are managing it.
You're an idiot. They're losing hundreds of millions every day over the leak - and that's just the cleanup/containment. There's also the negative publicity, which is immeasurable.
I'm in frigging Australia - sure, I want the leak stopped, but I doubt I have as much a vested interested in it as BP or it's shareholders.
Heck, where are you? Do you live near the leak? Did it directly affect you? And if so, how much? Unless you can quantify how this leak had a big direct, negative impact on you, well, I suggest you be quiet (I mean that nicely). Otherwise you just come across as another ranting fool, who's raving at BP because it's the trendy thing to do, without actually understanding the issues involved.
They screwed up, and they're going to pay for it, I'm sure, all of it. However, to allege it's some weird quasi-government conspiracy, or that they wanted the leak to happen just seems silly and uninformed.
Lol, I suggest you actually try and lookup some of the words you're throwing around.
Look, as I and other people have noted, corporations/companies are simply a legal construct. They can't, by definition (and as you've admitted) feel - and you can't have it both ways. They can't both be that, and greedy/selfish. Greed and selfishness are words we use to describe people.
A company can't be a sociopath. That's a completely idiotic statement. And a company doesn't have empathy or remorse because it's just words on a page - in this case, a business register, along with all the paperwork associated with a functioning company, and all the assets it owns, and liabilities it owes.
To use the much-vaunted car analogy:
It's like saying a car is a sociopath, because when it hits something, it doesn't feel anything. Well of course it doesn't, idiot. It's the person driving the car who controls it - they will be the ones to feel remorse, or grief, or sadness at hitting the person. The car itself is just a amalgamation of metal and plastic.
My father runs a small engineering business and he's had plenty of dealings with dodgy people who don't want to payup.
You're right, at least with big companies, you have shareholders, and regulatory oversight, as well as the threat of bad publicity. Whereas a small-time operator can just close shop and disappear. And it's not like the papers report on every single small-business that cheats, or goes under.
Also, in a big corporation, every person is a cog in the big machine - at the end of the day, they usually get their paycheque. It's not like a sole proprietor, who tries to save a few cents here and there, and knows it's all his own money on the line. Even the shareholders, who are ultimately the ones to benefit most from revenues/profits - their voting is on record, and it's usually an open forum between them.
Lol, you're using a strawman fallacy here and completely ignoring the main point - which is that humans, ever since the industrial revolution, have been masssively impacting their environment.
And we consistently choose our own comfort over the environment. It's just most sane people don't actually think it's a bad thing to value our own convenience, within reason.
Look, if you're prepared to go back to a subsistence agricultural kind of lifestyle, by all means.
I bet you use electricity. Actually, you do, you're on Slashdot, for crying out loud. Gee, I wonder where that electricity came from? Even so called "renewable" energy involves manufacturing, and shaping our environment. If you're really as green as you claim, I'd challenge you to give up the modern convenience of electricity. I give it what, a year before you come crawling back to mainstream society.
Like it or not, we humans damage our environment. We can try to mitigate that, and we should, but we're hypocrites and liars if we try and claim that we'd gladly put the environment over our own needs.
I know it's really popular and faux-trendy in the west to chant DOWN WITH CORPORATIONS! DOWN WITH GLOBALISATIONS!, but have you actually stopped and considered how idiotic you actually sound. *sigh*.
Just stop being sheeple for a second and think.
Corporations are just a legal construct - they're run by *people*. They people like money, and they're usually profit-driven. As the parent notes, this doesn't make them evil, it just makes them more concentrated form of what we're like
There are few people these days, in our Western nations that aren't driven by cost/convenience. Yet people are all talk, and no action.
I mean, jeez, look at the whole Buy Australian/Buy American thing.
It was trendy to be all anti-imports, but when it came time for people to put their money where their mouth is...they still buy cheap Chinese imports...lol. (I'm assuming here these people believed in mercantilism over globalisation, or something). They're hypcocrites, plain and simple, as many of these anti-globalisation/environmental trendies are.
You get all these faux-greenies, or anti-globalisation wannabes chanting stupid DOWN WITH BP! slogans. They're a frigging company, run for profit. They're not evil, or good, they're just a legal construct, that does things to make money. You can judge each action they do, on a moral scale, but you can't make blanket statements like COMPANIES ARE EVIL. You might as well say, environmentalists ARE EVIL because of all the terrible things Greenpeace or PETA have done. And believe me, there's a lot.
If you really want to put your money where your mouth is - go, setup a reserve somewhere, grow your own food, make your own textiles/clothing, and abscond modern conveniences like electricity and petroleum. The fact you're on Slashdot makes me think you won't last long. We'll see how long it is before you come back begging to be let back into society.
Actually, the largest religion isn't Buddhism (or Taoism), per se, because they aren't really practiced as a "religion", as such.
Most Chinese just have a mix of weird cultural superstitious, that get passed on in the family. They believe in a heaven (celestial court), and various Gods/deities/ghosts etc, but usually in a very general sense. This is something of a stereotype, but often they'll just pray in the hopes that their kids will get good marks at school, or they'll earn good money etc. They don't really mind/care much about the history behind it, or the reasons for it.
Even the way they practice Buddhism is more like just a collection of superstitions, or "thought systems"/"cultural practicses" (as the Wikipedia article refers to it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_China)
Very few Chinese people/family friends I know actually know much about the religion itself. Ironically, I'm Anglican, and I sometimes seem to know more about their faiths (from an academic point of view) than many of the practitioners do. Often, I've pointed out the reasons they're doing something, or they history behind something, and they'll be like...oh....we've just always done it because our parents did.
And officially, the Communists/CCP hate religion anyway, although this has relaxed somewhat.
Yeah, I have to say I don't get these people either. Personally, I dislike the idea of gyms for treadmills/bikes, unless there really is no room to run/exercise outside (other sorts of exercise obviously it makes sense).
My bestfriend is like that, I normally hates gyms, but she seems to like the idea of going there to run on a treadmill, yet loathes the idea of jogging for 15 minutes to get to the gym.
Or another friend, I play tennis with her, and she drives - I kid you not - literally 340 metres, around the corner to get to the tennis courts because it's "more comfortable than walking, and I don't want to lug my gear there".
This is Australia, mind you, where in most suburbs, we have nice leafy surrounds, and decent parks to run around in. I've moved to the city recently, and I have to say the running tracks and parks actually suck quite badly here -but I blame the Sydney City council for that. Still, even with our crummy Sydney weather lately, I much rather prefer running outside.
If I could find a decent place to run in the city, I'd much rather run outside, with the sun and wind, than cooped up in a stuffy apartment with lots of other sweaty people around.
However, as you note, repeating it again here is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, and the original author is simply asking for advice on a technical issue - tracking down his laptop. Also, as you point out, we have no idea whether he actually did take precautions, and this was just a determined thief.
My issue above was simply with the smarmy, self-satisfied tone of the other guy, sortius_nod, who really just came across as a bit of a jerk.
You at least came across as quite reasonable.
And look, at the end of the day, sure, you *should* take these precautions, but you don't usually blame the victim is somebody else commits a crime. You might say, you're a bit silly now, aren't you. But ultimately, committing a crime like this is wrong and makes you an A-class scumbag. But not being extra paranoid, or taking all failsafes is not *wrong*.
Also, even if the thief fences it, it doesn't matter. If the person who bought it is a legitimate person, they've just lost $500, and they'll be happy to cought up any details to help the police find this person. If they're a bit of a shifty-sort, and knew it was stolen, well, there's little honour among thieves, and I'm sure they'll also be happy to fess up to the police to take the heat off them.
There's a reason receiving stolen goods is a crime - precisely to discourage people from profiting from this sort of thing.
You realise that buying stolen property is err...a crime? Lol. Saying, "but officer, I bought it off this guy in the back of a van, he looked legit, I swear!" is not an admissible defense. As an above (more knowledgeable) posted, you've just made yourself an accessory to a crime.
So yeah, say he somehow didn't know it's a stolen box - the onus is on him to provide a paper trail to the police and prove he didn't. I mean, you buy a laptop from BestBuy - you get a receipt. You buy it from a pawnshop - you also get a receipt. And pawn-shops are required by law to take down details and photo-id for who they buy things from. If they don't, they go to jail. You buy it from some shifty looking guy on a street corner, gee, I wonder if you get a tax invoice...
The whole point is to discourage people from trading in fenced goods - which is a good thing. Thieves don't really add much to society (this isn't Ankh Morpork), so anything that discourages people from dealing with them is good.
Worst case scenario, the police go over, the guy says, I don't know where it came from, I swear, I just found it on a benchtop or something, the GP still gets his laptop back.
Yeah, I have to say, sortius_nod that you are being a bit of a tool here, mate.
Look, while I normally advocate that people need to take responsibility for their actions - this isn't like he left his house unlocked or something. He locked his car, it just so happened they probably smashed the window and got in and started searching for things.
I have absolutely no respect for people like that, and I really hope he does find them, and they have to face a court and explain why they stole.
The victim here is obviously happy to do legwork to get his belongings back, and it's not like he came here to whine about how unfair it was - he simply came here for advice, so the nice thing to do is to offer him whatever help we can.
I do exactly the same thing, and I keep my old Yahoo.com address around. Yet I never actually log into my Yahoo account directly. So I think there's probably some distortion there.
And I'm sorry, the Google is only good at Search is an old and debunked myth.
Gmail is *very* popular, and has awesome mindshare. Seriously, who the heck actually prefers Hotmail/Yahoo over it? Most people just stick to it because it's too hard to change addresses, and they don't know that you can check your other accounts via Gmail (like I and the parent poster do). However, nearly all of those non-tech-savvy people have still opened up Gmail accounts, and are starting to move across to them slowly.
Like it or not, Hotmail (or Live Mail, or whatever silly name they come up with next) and Yahoo Mail are slowly but inexorably losing ground to Gmail. The interface is better, the features are better (e.g. IMAP access, whereas Yahoo tries to charge you, offline via Google Gears/HTML5, iPad/Android HTML5 interface), more storage, and ongoing development (e.g. Gmail Labs), rather than the stagnation that seems to occur in the others.
Oh, and let's see...Android? Major win.
Google Voice - yup, also rabidly gaining ground.
Google Talk - becoming more popular, I don't know much about their share.
Google Checkout - slowly gaining ground, and the tie-ins to Android Market should help.
Picasa - Very popular
Google Code - Very Popular
Google Apps - Also gaining traction very quickly.
At the end of the day, their epic fails are mainly the social networking sphere, for some weird reason, and also in specific markets, usually due to censorship (e.g. China, or other backward EMEA nations).
Lol, there's a get off my lawn comment if ever I saw one...
Yes, I've had to sit through many a shaky home-video session of random niece/nephew/family friend eating a cake, but to write off YouTube as an afterthought...haha...gosh, where have you been for the last few years? Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, that's where the videos are being shared today.
When was the last time a friend asked you over *to their house* to share a funny video with you?
And at the big end of town, well, that's not for personal use. And I'm pretty sure if they could find something as good, they would. It's not exactly like they have any particularly loyalty to a particular conglomerate.
As you'll see in the post above, the music is renamed to random 4-character filenames (like NIXT.m4a), and these are randomly placed into folders called F00 through to F99.
Yes, there are third party application that can interpret the iTunes database on the device, and back it up. But you shouldn't have to do this.
I mean, just on the basis of my Blackberry and Android phone alone, I can see how music management can be done. I use Amarok to manage my tracks, or Songbird on Windows. I can transfer music easily between the two just by dragging the folder with the music I want. And I can easily back it up by just copying them to my disk array - and I don't need to worry about having to rename/retag all those files again.
Or how I'm going to copy my old iPod to a new iPod. Notice how iTunes doesn't give you an easy option of copying music off your iPod back into iTunes?
Slashdot Mirror
heya,
Your first point, I'm not going to argue on, because I don't know of the cases you're referring to. I assume here you mean recent ones? Perhaps you could cite examples.
Your second point - it is actually quite cheap, if you look at the whole picture, both the initial outlay and the ongoing cost. And it is relatively clean - the public likes to drum up the fears about nuclear waste, but the actual amount of waste is considerably less than that from the coal industry. A few pounds of nuclear material is enough to power a small city for a year. You compare that to the amount of coal you have to burn, and hundreds of metric tonnes of resulting pollution.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html
And assuming you find safe ways of getting it out of the way, it doesn't pollute the air and contribute to lung cancer. France themselves are leading pioneering research in recycling/reprocessing their nuclear waste. In the US, I believe there's a moratorium on reprocessing dating from the Carter Era, over fears that widespread proliferation of such technology might make it easy for terrorists to get nuclear weapons.
Your third point - that's the current situation. Isn't the whole point of this article to try and look as possibly increasing that percentage?
Fourth - as mentioned above, there's a massive outlay, obviously. It's not like you're just digging up rocks from the ground and burning them in a giant pit. And also, I think you're being a bit disingenious and selective with the facts here - the government also funds the coal industry...lol....and to a much larger amount. E.g. see this earlier story, when they were up in arms, when the Congress-funded U.S. Export-Import Bank denied them several hundred million dollars in loan guarantees:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/27/obamas-promise-to-bankrupt-coal-industry-to-cost-1000-jobs-in-upper-midwest/
http://blogsforvictory.com/2010/06/27/obamunism-coal-industry-jobs-lost-because-of-obama-policy/
(Yes, I've noticed both of those blogs seem to be pro-coal, or pro-global warming, if that makes sense...haha).
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Actually, BP, as an entity can be held liable, in the sense that it can be fined, or have extra regulatory controls imposed it. So that part at least isn't true.
And in fact, they could go further, and impose penalties on the board itself, if say, they were found to have acted fraudently. IANAL, of course.
However, this is all contingent on there actually being wrongdoing. You refer, for example to "justice".
Also, you claim that they were negligent. That remains to be seen - and I assume it will be proven one way or another in a court of law.
Obama's grand-standing aside - which to an Australian, just seemed like a bit of empty populist posturing, to try and score cheap political points - we don't yet know the full story.
At issue is whether they were say, just very unlucky, or whether there was actually say, criminal intent here. I somehow doubt it's at either end of that scale, and it probably lies somewhere in-between.
If you think of them as rational actors, it might seem plausible that they knew of the risk, but perhaps an engineer or manager screwed up the probabilities somewhere, and the precautions they took were inadequate. That, or they did calculate the risks correctly, but they were just unlucky, and well, s*it happens. Of course, they doesn't mean they're off scotch-free, as they still have to clean up their mess - after all, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place if they hadn't drilled at all, unlucky or not.
However, if it was just bad luck, then we can argue they should clean up their mess, it does limit the sort of holier-than-thou moral attacks we can pile on them. It's a bit like say, somebody in a car hits somebody. Now if aforesaid drive is doped up on illicit substances and driving unlicensed, or even decided to purposely run somebody over just for fun, then we can definitely say, that's quite a morally bad thing to do.
On the other hand, if it's just a freak accident, then well, it sucks, and it is their fault in a sense, but we wouldn't be as quick to judge. Once again, IANAL, but I'm fairly sure our legal system differentiates between the two cases, as well as in terms of intent.
If however, say somewhere in between those two extremes, and say, the driver was neglicient in their vehicle maintenance, and skipped a few service visits, or is just having a bad day (*cough* Tiger Woods*) and in good judgment shouldn't have been driving, then I'm sure we wouldn't be hard, as least morally, on them.
At the end of the day, I don't think there's any grand conspiracy going on, and I'm sure BP wants this mess cleaned up as quickly as anybody else - probably more. Hopefully our justice system will soon sort out exactly what happened, and ensure something on this magnitude doesn't occur again.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
First post...guess I must be using one of these new quicker multi-touch screens to type =).
Murphy's law. means I am so not going to be FP..lol.
heya,
Posted by a true Anonymous Coward...haha...
Please use your own account in future.
Also, I think you just discovered irony. You complain that I add noise - assumably because I don't agree with your particular point of view.
Yet your entire post didn't actually have any arguments, or indeed anything on-topic about the BP disaster - which is what we're meant to be talking to. It was basically a roundabout way of saying "Boo hoo, I don't agree with you, shut up, I'm taking my toys and going home".
Please post back on topic.
Thanks,
Victor
heya,
When I say here, I mean Australia - I'm in Sydney, he's in Tasmania. Tasmania's known for it wildlife freaks =). Beautiful place, though...haha...
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
You're on Slashdot. You use computers and electricity. Sorry, fail there.
And hydroelectric generation also causes vast environmental damage.
Go talk to Bob Brown, leader of the Greens party here in Australia about that...lol (he campaigned against a dam here in Tasmania).
I assume you live in some kind of permanent dwelling, as opposed to say, a cave or a tent? Yeah, impact there.
Fact of the matter is, you can try to mitigate it - e.g. I ride a bike around, I use energy-saving products, I recycle or reduce etc., but at the end of the day, we as humans, are having a major impact on the environment. We should take steps to reduce it, but it's something we have to deal with, at least if we want to keep our current lifestyles.
The only way to change that would probably be to drastically reduce our population (say, kill around 4-5 billion of us off?), and/or go back to a subsistence lifestyle, where we're at the mercy of predators, nature etc.
I doubt any of that is going to happen.
heya,
Please go read the threads again carefully.
You're making up some stupid strawman fallacy here.
My objection is to people who jump up and down screaming corporations are evil. They're not - they're just legal entities. It's like saying a car is evil because it kills people.
And it's not about putting forth strong opinions, as you say, lol. I'd have no objections to that. You can say, well, the BP management didn't do the right thing here, they didn't put enough contingencies, didn't clean it up in a timely manner etc.
(Although I might remind you that in the last 100 years, I think we've have err...two BOP disasters, including this one? So why it may have been lax, you can't really blame them for not thinking it would happen.).
However, to use this as a chance to get on your soapbox, and cry CAPITALISM IS EVIL, UP WITH STALIN! is just pure idiocy.
I have my doubts that BP "knew" of the problem, in the sense that you're inferring. It may have been a possibility, but somebody, an engineer somebody, weighed up the risks. Either way, it'll all come out in the wash. I'm not entirely sure how if this was say, a communist society, and the government was running this, things would be any different.
Would the government somehow magically have invested in better engineering, and not had any bureaucratic bungles? Cause gosh, we know the government is ever so efficient at managing large-scale projects in a timely and economical manner...
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Absolutely, I agree with you.
In Australia, we've got Bob Brown, leader of the Greens Party.
Now, ideologically, I've got a lot against extremist environmentalists like him.
However, I admire and respect the guy for standing up for what he believes. Last time I checked, I believe he lives on his own (or with his male partner) in Tasmania - which is as remote in Australia as you can get =). And I think I read in an interview that he lives quite simply, in a shack-ish sort of place, close to nature, no utilities etc.
Either way, I think he's wacked off, but I can respect that he's prepared to stick to his guns, and suffer for what he believes in (in this case the environment).
You compare that against the idiotic faux-greenies we have here in Sydney, driving their over-sized 4WD's, living in their McMansions, and sipping their $6 lattes - and complaining about OH GOSH, WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS ENVIRONMENT ISSUE. IT'S JUST TRAGIC, I TELL YOU.
About the only thing they do is lobby about airport noise, or about building new roads through their areas, because it'll decrease the value of their property.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Ok, you're an idiot - corporations, or companies, or whatever, are *just a legal construct*. They're how our economy works. What do you think entrepeneurship is about? The small business around your corner, or the sandwich shop, they're also companies - so if you say COMPANIES ARE EVIL!!!! then friendly Bob around the corner who runs your local milk-bar is also one of these aforesaid evil people.
I suggest you go take a basic course in economics 101. We're essentially a capitalistic society, tempered by government control for externalities (i.e. to protect the environment, ensure minimum wages etc.).
If you don't have private corporations, you have what, exactly - government run companies? Lol. Gee, we saw how well that worked in USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK etc. Even China, once the last bastion of communism, basically went capitalistic in the 1980's, under Deng Xiao Ping.
Look, communism failed, ok, and it's pretty much a joke in the real world. Maybe in some dream world where everybody is altruistic, but it just doesn't work in our fallen world.
There isn't an alterantive to it, that we know of yet. You're right that we should have controls.
However, then you make idiotic statements like "limit their growth", or "they aren't needed". You seem to have very little understanding of how a modern economy functions, or what things like efficient allocation of resources means.
And I'm not American, so my American history is patchy, but this is the first I've heard of the founding fathers wanting to outlaw capitalism? They were communists? First I've heard of that - can any other American back that up?
Corporations aren't "worse" for people, or anything like that. Occasionally (or often, depending on your POV), management of these companies may make bad decisions. But that's just like Bob your local hardware store can make a bad decision, or you or I can make a bad decision. It's not the company, it's the people who are managing it.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
If you're trying to paraphrase Hamlet, the "methinks" actually goes at the end, lol.
The original quote is:
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
But it's often mis-quoted as:
Methinks the lady doth protest too much
e.g. http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lady-doth-protest-too-much-methinks
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
You're an idiot. They're losing hundreds of millions every day over the leak - and that's just the cleanup/containment. There's also the negative publicity, which is immeasurable.
I'm in frigging Australia - sure, I want the leak stopped, but I doubt I have as much a vested interested in it as BP or it's shareholders.
Heck, where are you? Do you live near the leak? Did it directly affect you? And if so, how much? Unless you can quantify how this leak had a big direct, negative impact on you, well, I suggest you be quiet (I mean that nicely). Otherwise you just come across as another ranting fool, who's raving at BP because it's the trendy thing to do, without actually understanding the issues involved.
They screwed up, and they're going to pay for it, I'm sure, all of it. However, to allege it's some weird quasi-government conspiracy, or that they wanted the leak to happen just seems silly and uninformed.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Lol, I suggest you actually try and lookup some of the words you're throwing around.
Look, as I and other people have noted, corporations/companies are simply a legal construct. They can't, by definition (and as you've admitted) feel - and you can't have it both ways. They can't both be that, and greedy/selfish. Greed and selfishness are words we use to describe people.
A company can't be a sociopath. That's a completely idiotic statement. And a company doesn't have empathy or remorse because it's just words on a page - in this case, a business register, along with all the paperwork associated with a functioning company, and all the assets it owns, and liabilities it owes.
To use the much-vaunted car analogy:
It's like saying a car is a sociopath, because when it hits something, it doesn't feel anything. Well of course it doesn't, idiot. It's the person driving the car who controls it - they will be the ones to feel remorse, or grief, or sadness at hitting the person. The car itself is just a amalgamation of metal and plastic.
See how idiotic it sounds, to say a car is evil?
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you there.
My father runs a small engineering business and he's had plenty of dealings with dodgy people who don't want to payup.
You're right, at least with big companies, you have shareholders, and regulatory oversight, as well as the threat of bad publicity. Whereas a small-time operator can just close shop and disappear. And it's not like the papers report on every single small-business that cheats, or goes under.
Also, in a big corporation, every person is a cog in the big machine - at the end of the day, they usually get their paycheque. It's not like a sole proprietor, who tries to save a few cents here and there, and knows it's all his own money on the line. Even the shareholders, who are ultimately the ones to benefit most from revenues/profits - their voting is on record, and it's usually an open forum between them.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Lol, you're using a strawman fallacy here and completely ignoring the main point - which is that humans, ever since the industrial revolution, have been masssively impacting their environment.
And we consistently choose our own comfort over the environment. It's just most sane people don't actually think it's a bad thing to value our own convenience, within reason.
Look, if you're prepared to go back to a subsistence agricultural kind of lifestyle, by all means.
I bet you use electricity. Actually, you do, you're on Slashdot, for crying out loud. Gee, I wonder where that electricity came from? Even so called "renewable" energy involves manufacturing, and shaping our environment. If you're really as green as you claim, I'd challenge you to give up the modern convenience of electricity. I give it what, a year before you come crawling back to mainstream society.
Like it or not, we humans damage our environment. We can try to mitigate that, and we should, but we're hypocrites and liars if we try and claim that we'd gladly put the environment over our own needs.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Actually, he's made a damn good point.
I know it's really popular and faux-trendy in the west to chant DOWN WITH CORPORATIONS! DOWN WITH GLOBALISATIONS!, but have you actually stopped and considered how idiotic you actually sound. *sigh*.
Just stop being sheeple for a second and think.
Corporations are just a legal construct - they're run by *people*. They people like money, and they're usually profit-driven. As the parent notes, this doesn't make them evil, it just makes them more concentrated form of what we're like
There are few people these days, in our Western nations that aren't driven by cost/convenience. Yet people are all talk, and no action.
I mean, jeez, look at the whole Buy Australian/Buy American thing.
It was trendy to be all anti-imports, but when it came time for people to put their money where their mouth is...they still buy cheap Chinese imports...lol. (I'm assuming here these people believed in mercantilism over globalisation, or something). They're hypcocrites, plain and simple, as many of these anti-globalisation/environmental trendies are.
You get all these faux-greenies, or anti-globalisation wannabes chanting stupid DOWN WITH BP! slogans. They're a frigging company, run for profit. They're not evil, or good, they're just a legal construct, that does things to make money. You can judge each action they do, on a moral scale, but you can't make blanket statements like COMPANIES ARE EVIL. You might as well say, environmentalists ARE EVIL because of all the terrible things Greenpeace or PETA have done. And believe me, there's a lot.
If you really want to put your money where your mouth is - go, setup a reserve somewhere, grow your own food, make your own textiles/clothing, and abscond modern conveniences like electricity and petroleum. The fact you're on Slashdot makes me think you won't last long. We'll see how long it is before you come back begging to be let back into society.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
A lot of it is probably petty squabbling between different departments/divisons/fiefdoms.
It's like they're all warlords, and we're back in the Warring States period...lol...
And Mao Ze Dong was definitely not Qin Si Huang.
Cheers,
Victor.
heya,
Actually, the largest religion isn't Buddhism (or Taoism), per se, because they aren't really practiced as a "religion", as such.
Most Chinese just have a mix of weird cultural superstitious, that get passed on in the family. They believe in a heaven (celestial court), and various Gods/deities/ghosts etc, but usually in a very general sense. This is something of a stereotype, but often they'll just pray in the hopes that their kids will get good marks at school, or they'll earn good money etc. They don't really mind/care much about the history behind it, or the reasons for it.
Even the way they practice Buddhism is more like just a collection of superstitions, or "thought systems"/"cultural practicses" (as the Wikipedia article refers to it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_China)
Very few Chinese people/family friends I know actually know much about the religion itself. Ironically, I'm Anglican, and I sometimes seem to know more about their faiths (from an academic point of view) than many of the practitioners do. Often, I've pointed out the reasons they're doing something, or they history behind something, and they'll be like...oh....we've just always done it because our parents did.
And officially, the Communists/CCP hate religion anyway, although this has relaxed somewhat.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Yeah, I have to say I don't get these people either. Personally, I dislike the idea of gyms for treadmills/bikes, unless there really is no room to run/exercise outside (other sorts of exercise obviously it makes sense).
My bestfriend is like that, I normally hates gyms, but she seems to like the idea of going there to run on a treadmill, yet loathes the idea of jogging for 15 minutes to get to the gym.
Or another friend, I play tennis with her, and she drives - I kid you not - literally 340 metres, around the corner to get to the tennis courts because it's "more comfortable than walking, and I don't want to lug my gear there".
This is Australia, mind you, where in most suburbs, we have nice leafy surrounds, and decent parks to run around in. I've moved to the city recently, and I have to say the running tracks and parks actually suck quite badly here -but I blame the Sydney City council for that. Still, even with our crummy Sydney weather lately, I much rather prefer running outside.
If I could find a decent place to run in the city, I'd much rather run outside, with the sun and wind, than cooped up in a stuffy apartment with lots of other sweaty people around.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Absolute, I agree that all of that is good voice.
However, as you note, repeating it again here is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, and the original author is simply asking for advice on a technical issue - tracking down his laptop. Also, as you point out, we have no idea whether he actually did take precautions, and this was just a determined thief.
My issue above was simply with the smarmy, self-satisfied tone of the other guy, sortius_nod, who really just came across as a bit of a jerk.
You at least came across as quite reasonable.
And look, at the end of the day, sure, you *should* take these precautions, but you don't usually blame the victim is somebody else commits a crime. You might say, you're a bit silly now, aren't you. But ultimately, committing a crime like this is wrong and makes you an A-class scumbag. But not being extra paranoid, or taking all failsafes is not *wrong*.
Also, even if the thief fences it, it doesn't matter. If the person who bought it is a legitimate person, they've just lost $500, and they'll be happy to cought up any details to help the police find this person. If they're a bit of a shifty-sort, and knew it was stolen, well, there's little honour among thieves, and I'm sure they'll also be happy to fess up to the police to take the heat off them.
There's a reason receiving stolen goods is a crime - precisely to discourage people from profiting from this sort of thing.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
You realise that buying stolen property is err...a crime? Lol. Saying, "but officer, I bought it off this guy in the back of a van, he looked legit, I swear!" is not an admissible defense. As an above (more knowledgeable) posted, you've just made yourself an accessory to a crime.
So yeah, say he somehow didn't know it's a stolen box - the onus is on him to provide a paper trail to the police and prove he didn't. I mean, you buy a laptop from BestBuy - you get a receipt. You buy it from a pawnshop - you also get a receipt. And pawn-shops are required by law to take down details and photo-id for who they buy things from. If they don't, they go to jail. You buy it from some shifty looking guy on a street corner, gee, I wonder if you get a tax invoice...
The whole point is to discourage people from trading in fenced goods - which is a good thing. Thieves don't really add much to society (this isn't Ankh Morpork), so anything that discourages people from dealing with them is good.
Worst case scenario, the police go over, the guy says, I don't know where it came from, I swear, I just found it on a benchtop or something, the GP still gets his laptop back.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Yeah, I have to say, sortius_nod that you are being a bit of a tool here, mate.
Look, while I normally advocate that people need to take responsibility for their actions - this isn't like he left his house unlocked or something. He locked his car, it just so happened they probably smashed the window and got in and started searching for things.
I have absolutely no respect for people like that, and I really hope he does find them, and they have to face a court and explain why they stole.
The victim here is obviously happy to do legwork to get his belongings back, and it's not like he came here to whine about how unfair it was - he simply came here for advice, so the nice thing to do is to offer him whatever help we can.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
I do exactly the same thing, and I keep my old Yahoo.com address around. Yet I never actually log into my Yahoo account directly. So I think there's probably some distortion there.
And I'm sorry, the Google is only good at Search is an old and debunked myth.
Gmail is *very* popular, and has awesome mindshare. Seriously, who the heck actually prefers Hotmail/Yahoo over it? Most people just stick to it because it's too hard to change addresses, and they don't know that you can check your other accounts via Gmail (like I and the parent poster do). However, nearly all of those non-tech-savvy people have still opened up Gmail accounts, and are starting to move across to them slowly.
Like it or not, Hotmail (or Live Mail, or whatever silly name they come up with next) and Yahoo Mail are slowly but inexorably losing ground to Gmail. The interface is better, the features are better (e.g. IMAP access, whereas Yahoo tries to charge you, offline via Google Gears/HTML5, iPad/Android HTML5 interface), more storage, and ongoing development (e.g. Gmail Labs), rather than the stagnation that seems to occur in the others.
Oh, and let's see...Android? Major win.
Google Voice - yup, also rabidly gaining ground.
Google Talk - becoming more popular, I don't know much about their share.
Google Checkout - slowly gaining ground, and the tie-ins to Android Market should help.
Picasa - Very popular
Google Code - Very Popular
Google Apps - Also gaining traction very quickly.
At the end of the day, their epic fails are mainly the social networking sphere, for some weird reason, and also in specific markets, usually due to censorship (e.g. China, or other backward EMEA nations).
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Lol, there's a get off my lawn comment if ever I saw one...
Yes, I've had to sit through many a shaky home-video session of random niece/nephew/family friend eating a cake, but to write off YouTube as an afterthought...haha...gosh, where have you been for the last few years? Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, that's where the videos are being shared today.
When was the last time a friend asked you over *to their house* to share a funny video with you?
And at the big end of town, well, that's not for personal use. And I'm pretty sure if they could find something as good, they would. It's not exactly like they have any particularly loyalty to a particular conglomerate.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
I didn't know what VLA was in this context, so I did a Google search..so...err, which VLA? Lol.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
I'm talking about backing up an iPod.
As you'll see in the post above, the music is renamed to random 4-character filenames (like NIXT.m4a), and these are randomly placed into folders called F00 through to F99.
Yes, there are third party application that can interpret the iTunes database on the device, and back it up. But you shouldn't have to do this.
I mean, just on the basis of my Blackberry and Android phone alone, I can see how music management can be done. I use Amarok to manage my tracks, or Songbird on Windows. I can transfer music easily between the two just by dragging the folder with the music I want. And I can easily back it up by just copying them to my disk array - and I don't need to worry about having to rename/retag all those files again.
Or how I'm going to copy my old iPod to a new iPod. Notice how iTunes doesn't give you an easy option of copying music off your iPod back into iTunes?
Cheers,
Victor