Microsoft's first mover advantage is balanced by Microsoft's "we can't put together a good first release to save our lives" disadvantage. I think Sony has little reason to be worried.
Many parts of Europe still scrape their sensitive regions with abrasive paper, just like the US. The more civilized parts of Europe, however, have a separate fixture called a "bidet". It cleanses by irrigation. The Japanese have come up with a less elegant, but more space saving design, by combining a toilet, a bidet, and a blow dryer.
This sort of thing shows that Linux is probably one of the legally safest systems you can use. What other system has been vetted so carefully and scrutinized by so many hostile lawyers and experts?
I bet that proprietary code bases are full of copyright and patent violations. And don't be so sure that indemnification will get you out of a lawsuit if you have deep pockets.
Yeah but still they can get the patent on it first then they can start thinking about production.
Why? What exactly have they contributed? Plenty of other people have thought of this, it just happens to be the case that display technology isn't up to it yet. When it will be, why should these people get a monopoly on it?
The BBC is paid for by fees that anybody with a television is required to pay. So, no, whatever you get from the BBC isn't free, it's paid for. Given that the BBC produces some of the best programming anywhere, I think that's still a good deal.
Is it unfair? No. Contrary what companies want you to believe, they exist only because the public lets them. We can dissolve corporate charters, hand out monopolies, regulate companies, put companies under state control, and destroy business models. The only thing we can't do is disown people: people can get whatever their shares are worth after we, the people, are through with doing to a company what we think needs to be done to a company.
As a rule, we don't do a lot of unnecessary things to companies because it is bad. But people need to be reminded every now and then that corporations only exist for our benefit as a society, not for any other purpose.
Rather than the engine design described in the article, there is a much more elegant and simpler one; you can find more info here.
The idea is that you aim anti-protons against a thick "sail" made out of some heavy element. The radiation generated in the annihilation directly propels the craft, in a kind of combination solar sail/ion drive.
The neat thing about that design is that it doesn't have any moving parts and needs no additional propellant.
You're using te word "directly" to mean "indeirectly". A bit like using "up" to mean "down", "peace" to mean "war" or "democracy" to mean whatever it is you mean by the term.
You are using the term "democracy" whatever you want it to mean. I use it to mean exactly what almost everybody else understands it to mean: the form of government found in the UK, in France, in the US, in Germany, and in Japan, among others.
And I'm saying that the EU operates the same way: it's a federal democracy; the only differences are that it is one level above national governments and that it is less powerful than national governments.
The reason I cannot tell, is because you persistenty dodge the issue.
No, it is you who keeps dodging the issue. All you keep telling us is what you hope good government should accomplish, not how a government should work and how the millions of decision makers in a government should get appointed "directly".
Name a single democracy in the world that works the way you say it should. Point to a description of how your kind of government would work. Then we can talk.
Ballmer's ignorance and arrogance are astounding. Let's just take a simple example: Longhorn. IBM was shipping Longhorn technologies already years ago: database file system, vector graphics (DPS), managed code (Smalltalk, among many others), handwriting and speech recognition, and system wide object model (SOM). Some of these, IBM already shipped decades ago. Some of these technologies, Microsoft is only shipping because they cloned existing products and even hired away IBM employees.
The notion that Microsoft is even in the same league in terms of innovation as IBM is laughable. Microsoft has yet to prove that they can deliver any kind of innovation beyond Clippy and Bob in their products at all.
We destroyed the societies in those nations. We destroyed their religions and still send missionaries. We imposed colonialism on them. We supply them with arms. We prop up undemocratic regimes. We are destroying their agricultural base. We are exporting our pollution and social problems to them by giving them no choice but to produce in sweat shops and destroy their environment.
If we left these people alone, maybe in a few centuries, they would recover. But we owe them a big debt, and right now, we still make their plight worse on balance.
Anyway, what I want is a Europe where all legislators are directly elected.
European legislators are directly elected, in the same sense they are in most other democracies: the lower house is elected, the upper house is appointed.
But even so: the crux of the argument remains the question of what you think a democracy is for. As long as you refuse to answer that question, I have no way to tell if your position is consistent, or if you're changing your premise every five seconds.
My "premise" is consistent and simple: the EU is structured like most other federal democracies in the world: three branches of government, two houses, a directly elected lower house, and an appointed upper house. The primary difference between the EU and other federal democracies is that the EU has more limited powers than a federal government, and that's mostly because member governments have cold feet over transfering more power to the EU (and that's because of voters like you--see, you do count).
The underlying point remains though: Peter Mandleson has no more reason to care than did Kinnock in his day.
I thought your point was that those were lifetime appointments. Is Kinnock dead?
In any case, they aren't lifetime appointments: each commissioner is answerable to his appointing government and the MEPs, and commissioners can be ousted by them.
I think it's systematically unjust, and unrepresentative, and I think that as a citizen, I'm entitled both to complain and to criticise. Do you disagree?
You can complain and criticize, but other people are entitled to point out that your criticism is based on factual errors: your concept of democracy applies to no democracy in the world (and certainly not your own), you don't know your representative in the EU, you confuse executive and legislative bodies in the EU, you make wild and incorrect statements about "lifetime appointments", among other things. If you don't know even basic things about how the EU works, you aren't criticizing, you are merely whining.
The current UK govt are a pack of lying tosspots.
It seems to me you just have a problem with democratic governments in general: you are unhappy with the EU government and you are unhappy with the UK government. Democracy is no guarantee of good government, or of honesty or integrity in government. The only thing democracy guarantees is that if enough people are sufficiently unhappy, they can get rid of a government after a few years. It means that you can voice your unhappiness, but it also means that you have to live with it if the majority of your fellow citizens are not sufficiently unhappy to do something about the status quo at the ballot box.
considering your extreme reluctance to express any conviction at all, except for negative ones regarding myself and my nation anyway
I don't view the UK much differently from other European nations. In fact, there are many historical UK contributions that I view as very positive: literature, language, scientific research, some legal and business traditions, etc. As a nation, the UK has a lot to be proud of.
What I observe is, however, that, more than other European nations, the UK seems to have trouble coming to terms with the unpleasant bits of its history, its current economic and political situation, and finding its post-WWII role in Europe. And as issues like EMU and Iraq show, the UK likes to go it alone.
In the end, I think Europe isn't going to go very far in the direction the UK wants it to, and it certainly isn't going to go in the direction you want it to. I think the only option the UK has is to decide whether it wants to be part of the EU as it is or not. If you think the EU is undemocratic and corrupt, then elect a UK government that takes the UK out of the EU
It would be quite different. Different ethnic groups and "races" are biologically almost identical to each other. But Neanderthal seems to be a different species. Having another intelligent species on the planet (again) would be a huge change for us.
"here we have a 20 year old protocol, a part of the Internet infrastructure that hasn't been touched in 10 years and we were all sure was right, and now is cast in doubt."
If "we" were all sure, then maybe the wrong people are working on internet and security. The people designing the internet weren't concerned much with adversarial nodes or any of the other ills we have today, and anybody who thinks that ICMP, routing, etc., are in any way secure is a fool. The only reason it works as well as it does is because in the places that really matter (within a single large provider network infrastructure), there is some centralized control.
But it's the system that's been deployed, everybody has to keep their eyes open for potential problems, and they need to get fixed as they get identified. Most security is being handled at a higher level now anyway (certificates, encryption, signatures, etc.), so that the primary thing we have to worry about resulting from the deficiencies of the underlying network is denial of service.
Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut?
Kaplan's complaints are warranted, based on the history of Go. And now that Microsoft's conduct has been laid bare by other lawsuits, he is trying to take advantage of that, because it does make his case simpler: it has been demonstrated clearly that Microsoft has a pattern of anti-competitive behavior, and a lot of useful Microsoft-internal information has come to light.
You've got the draw the line somewhere on employees being allowed to express personal opinions. I say the only criterion should be "Does this opinion adversely affect the employee's ability to do their job?"
That's not where we draw the line (nor do I think we should). We draw the line at "does it affect the company bottom line adversely".
Your wife's race usually doesn't affect the company bottom line adversely. However, even if it did, race and a few other factors are explicitly special cases under the law.
And we can't have people wearing crosses, stars of david, head scarves, or yin/yang symbols to work either, because "religious messages disrupt workplace harmony..."
I think that would be a very sensible policy, actually, as long as it is applied consistently to all religions within the workplace. However, like race, society has decided that this is a special case. You'd have to ask an employment lawyer, though, to find out what is legal and what is not in that area.
Is that acceptable to fire someone that voices such an opinion? I don't think so.
Think about a corporation having 20 employees struggling to get a new product out and getting more money. Now, one of its employees gives an interview and says "our product sucks; it can't even do (fill in whatever), and it won't be out in time either". I think it's justified firing that employee (whether it's legal is another question).
If the company is Microsoft or IBM, then it's a different matter. A Microsoft employee should arguably be able to say "I think Word sucks" without getting fired if he says it in a clearly private capacity. But if he's the head of the Word development team giving an interview saying "Word sucks", that would be justification for firing him.
I believe this argument was used as the justification for the private corporation that fired an employee during the U.S. presidential election primaries because the person attended a Bush rally wearing anti-Bush shirts.
That behavior is unrelated to workplace conduct or company products, so I think that's a bad justification.
If the employee wore a "Bush sucks" T-shirt to work, then the company can fire him, provided they also fire any employee wearing a "Kerry sucks" T-shirt. The justification would be "political messages disrupt workplace harmony". But the company has no business selecting one or the other political message (unless it's, say, a company with an explicitly partisan purpose).
Do you even know what a "religious fundamendalist zealot" is? I've yet to read about Bush hanging Laura in the name of God for some minor mistake she made.
You can be a "religious fundamentalist zealot" and be completely non-violent. Religious fundamentalism is about a hare-brained and intolerant interpretation of scriptures, not about homicidal tendencies (although one may lead to the other).
(Besides, has Laura even made any such "minor mistakes"?)
You have just stated that it's OK for employees to fire people for holding an opinion contrary to the opinion of the "corporation". That is a ridiculus assertion.
No, he stated that it's OK to fire people for publicly stating an opinion that is contrary to the business interests of the corporation.
Is that ridiculous? It may be, or it may not be. It depends on the nature of the statement, the nature of the business, and the relationship between the two.
I offered my opinion that the sole virtue of democracy is that it implements the will of the electorate. I asked you what the benefit of democracy was that we could discard representation of the people and still you would support it
I disagree with your premise: the EU does not "discard representation of the people" merely because many of its representatives are appointed. (I also disagree with your premise that the "sole virtue of democracy is that it implements the will of the electorate", but that's a separate debate.)
The EU system is analogous to the way most federations work: it has a directly elected lower house, an upper house consisting of members appointed by the member nations, and an appointed executive branch. That kind of arrangement is an accepted way of implementing representative democracy. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's not going to change.
Because the EU is still in its infancy, created out of a mostly economic association of sovereign governments, the lower house currently has less power than in other federal governments, but, then, the EU as a whole also has less power than a federal government. That transfer of power is intended to change gradually over time, to give everybody time to adjust.
Yes, but the MEPs are not legislators.
The MEPs are very much legislators. Not very powerful legislators, but legislators nonetheless.
Their role is advisory. They have very little power, and as has been recently demonstrated, no power that cannot be overruled. So my vote there is next to meaningless.
That's because governments, like your own, like to keep it that way. I'm sure that if the UK made a big deal out of it and said "we insist that the MEPs get more power right away", they could get other member nations to listen and perhaps change something. In actual fact, the UK government appears to be trying to push things in the opposite direction.
"The other legislative body, the Council of Ministers, consists of representatives appointed by your own national government."
Cute, but wrong. EU commisoners seem to be lifetime appointments.
You're confusing two separate parts of the EU government. The Commissioners are part of the executive branch, the Council of Ministers are part of the legislative branch. The Commissioners are not "lifetime appointments"--they serve at the leisure of the member governments, need to be approved by the President and the European Parliament, and can be ousted in a no confidence vote by MEPs.
Neil Kinnock can do what he likes - I cannot unelect him.
Your Commissioner is Peter Mandelson, not Neil Kinnock. And I suspect that if you "unelect" your government, Mandelson will be kicked out as well.
As it is - well just hit google news with "eu corruption" and see what you get back. It's hardly controversial.
All governments are corrupt to some degree or another. Search for "british corruption" and "uk corruption" and you'll get lots of hits, too. Furthermore, your premise that giving more power to the MEPs or abolishing the Council and Commissioners and replacing them (with what exactly?) would reduce corruption is unproven. More likely, more financial transparency, more responsibility of the member nations for their officials, and better supervision would be more effective than changing how those bodies are elected.
Again, I can just ask you, what do you want? Why do you keep complaining about the EU as if it were some monarch or dictator imposed from the outside? The EU does what its member governments decide it should do, no more and no less. Your democratically elected government decided that your nation should be part of the EU and helped define the way the EU operates. What's your problem with that?
If anything, the UK government is keeping the EU from being a more democratic government and instead wants to maintain it more as a loose economic association. A loose economic assoc
You're talking about how they work. I'm talking abouyt what they are supposed to do. I'm not interested in making excuses for non-representative democracies. I want fair and equal representation for everyone.
OK, so, to summarize (1) you believe that in order for a government to be called "democratic", all decision makers need to be elected by the citizens, and (2) you acknowledge that there is no government in which that is the case. Therefore, you apparently deny that democracies exist at all right now.
I'm just saying that it's pretty clear that something called "democracies" exist, that all of them have lots of unelected decision makers, so the EU is no exception. And with the European Parliament directly elected, the EU seems no less democratic than the UK, with its anachronistic Upper House.
"Furthermore, you are placing blame in the wrong place. The only people who decide who is going to represent the UK at the EU is the UK government. If you think that the selection is "undemocratic", then that's a problem internal to the UK, not a problem with the EU."
I'm not talking about the UK's role in Europe. My point concerns the unrepresentative nature of the EU. You will find that I am not the only european dissatisfied with the setup in the EU
I'm not talking about the UK's role in Europe either. I'm saying that the EU doesn't choose who represents you in the EU bodies, so you can't hold the EU responsible if you aren't happy with your representatives. The members of the European Parliament are already elected by the citizens, so you presumably had an opportunity to vote for yours. The other legislative body, the Council of Ministers, consists of representatives appointed by your own national government. If you think their choice is undemocratic, you have to take that up with your own national government; nobody but your national government has a say in that.
Furthermore, the "setup of the EU" isn't something bureaucrats in Brussels decide, it's something the national governments constituting the EU decide on. The current system (European Parliament and Council of Ministers) strikes me as pretty sensible. If you don't like it, you have to work through your government and your EU representatives to change it; as far as I can tell, your government actually opposes a greater transfer of power to the directly elected representatives, so if you consider that "undemocratic", you are sitting right at the source of those policies.
As for the EU Constitution, based on the polls preceding the referenda, people generally like the idea of an EU Constitution, they just hated this particular document. So did I. Our rejection of this Constitution is different from your apparent general Euro-fatigue.
Slashdot Mirror
The PSP is a gorgeous piece of hardware. I don't want one. Really. That's not what I want to carry around and play games on.
A portable game machine needs to look and feel simple and sturdy. Nintendo has that down a lot better than Sony.
Microsoft's first mover advantage is balanced by Microsoft's "we can't put together a good first release to save our lives" disadvantage. I think Sony has little reason to be worried.
Do they not use paperless toilet's in Europe?
Many parts of Europe still scrape their sensitive regions with abrasive paper, just like the US. The more civilized parts of Europe, however, have a separate fixture called a "bidet". It cleanses by irrigation. The Japanese have come up with a less elegant, but more space saving design, by combining a toilet, a bidet, and a blow dryer.
This sort of thing shows that Linux is probably one of the legally safest systems you can use. What other system has been vetted so carefully and scrutinized by so many hostile lawyers and experts?
I bet that proprietary code bases are full of copyright and patent violations. And don't be so sure that indemnification will get you out of a lawsuit if you have deep pockets.
Yeah but still they can get the patent on it first then they can start thinking about production.
Why? What exactly have they contributed? Plenty of other people have thought of this, it just happens to be the case that display technology isn't up to it yet. When it will be, why should these people get a monopoly on it?
They couldn't get the 2D-based face recognition to work sufficiently reliably, so they need a special 3D camera.
The BBC is paid for by fees that anybody with a television is required to pay. So, no, whatever you get from the BBC isn't free, it's paid for. Given that the BBC produces some of the best programming anywhere, I think that's still a good deal.
Is it unfair? No. Contrary what companies want you to believe, they exist only because the public lets them. We can dissolve corporate charters, hand out monopolies, regulate companies, put companies under state control, and destroy business models. The only thing we can't do is disown people: people can get whatever their shares are worth after we, the people, are through with doing to a company what we think needs to be done to a company.
As a rule, we don't do a lot of unnecessary things to companies because it is bad. But people need to be reminded every now and then that corporations only exist for our benefit as a society, not for any other purpose.
With barely above 2% market share, Apple is irrelevant to Intel or the PC market. Linux is a far more important OS for Intel than Apple.
Rather than the engine design described in the article, there is a much more elegant and simpler one; you can find more info here.
The idea is that you aim anti-protons against a thick "sail" made out of some heavy element. The radiation generated in the annihilation directly propels the craft, in a kind of combination solar sail/ion drive.
The neat thing about that design is that it doesn't have any moving parts and needs no additional propellant.
You're using te word "directly" to mean "indeirectly". A bit like using "up" to mean "down", "peace" to mean "war" or "democracy" to mean whatever it is you mean by the term.
You are using the term "democracy" whatever you want it to mean. I use it to mean exactly what almost everybody else understands it to mean: the form of government found in the UK, in France, in the US, in Germany, and in Japan, among others.
And I'm saying that the EU operates the same way: it's a federal democracy; the only differences are that it is one level above national governments and that it is less powerful than national governments.
The reason I cannot tell, is because you persistenty dodge the issue.
No, it is you who keeps dodging the issue. All you keep telling us is what you hope good government should accomplish, not how a government should work and how the millions of decision makers in a government should get appointed "directly".
Name a single democracy in the world that works the way you say it should. Point to a description of how your kind of government would work. Then we can talk.
"Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so.
Ballmer's ignorance and arrogance are astounding. Let's just take a simple example: Longhorn. IBM was shipping Longhorn technologies already years ago: database file system, vector graphics (DPS), managed code (Smalltalk, among many others), handwriting and speech recognition, and system wide object model (SOM). Some of these, IBM already shipped decades ago. Some of these technologies, Microsoft is only shipping because they cloned existing products and even hired away IBM employees.
The notion that Microsoft is even in the same league in terms of innovation as IBM is laughable. Microsoft has yet to prove that they can deliver any kind of innovation beyond Clippy and Bob in their products at all.
We've been using genetic algorithims and studying emergent behaviour for a while now, and there are some very advanced code bases out there.
Roughly, the modern day equivalent of alchemy: put a newt, a cat's paw, and three hairs into a retort, and then see whether something "emerges".
We destroyed the societies in those nations. We destroyed their religions and still send missionaries. We imposed colonialism on them. We supply them with arms. We prop up undemocratic regimes. We are destroying their agricultural base. We are exporting our pollution and social problems to them by giving them no choice but to produce in sweat shops and destroy their environment.
If we left these people alone, maybe in a few centuries, they would recover. But we owe them a big debt, and right now, we still make their plight worse on balance.
Anyway, what I want is a Europe where all legislators are directly elected.
European legislators are directly elected, in the same sense they are in most other democracies: the lower house is elected, the upper house is appointed.
But even so: the crux of the argument remains the question of what you think a democracy is for. As long as you refuse to answer that question, I have no way to tell if your position is consistent, or if you're changing your premise every five seconds.
My "premise" is consistent and simple: the EU is structured like most other federal democracies in the world: three branches of government, two houses, a directly elected lower house, and an appointed upper house. The primary difference between the EU and other federal democracies is that the EU has more limited powers than a federal government, and that's mostly because member governments have cold feet over transfering more power to the EU (and that's because of voters like you--see, you do count).
The underlying point remains though: Peter Mandleson has no more reason to care than did Kinnock in his day.
I thought your point was that those were lifetime appointments. Is Kinnock dead?
In any case, they aren't lifetime appointments: each commissioner is answerable to his appointing government and the MEPs, and commissioners can be ousted by them.
I think it's systematically unjust, and unrepresentative, and I think that as a citizen, I'm entitled both to complain and to criticise. Do you disagree?
You can complain and criticize, but other people are entitled to point out that your criticism is based on factual errors: your concept of democracy applies to no democracy in the world (and certainly not your own), you don't know your representative in the EU, you confuse executive and legislative bodies in the EU, you make wild and incorrect statements about "lifetime appointments", among other things. If you don't know even basic things about how the EU works, you aren't criticizing, you are merely whining.
The current UK govt are a pack of lying tosspots.
It seems to me you just have a problem with democratic governments in general: you are unhappy with the EU government and you are unhappy with the UK government. Democracy is no guarantee of good government, or of honesty or integrity in government. The only thing democracy guarantees is that if enough people are sufficiently unhappy, they can get rid of a government after a few years. It means that you can voice your unhappiness, but it also means that you have to live with it if the majority of your fellow citizens are not sufficiently unhappy to do something about the status quo at the ballot box.
considering your extreme reluctance to express any conviction at all, except for negative ones regarding myself and my nation anyway
I don't view the UK much differently from other European nations. In fact, there are many historical UK contributions that I view as very positive: literature, language, scientific research, some legal and business traditions, etc. As a nation, the UK has a lot to be proud of.
What I observe is, however, that, more than other European nations, the UK seems to have trouble coming to terms with the unpleasant bits of its history, its current economic and political situation, and finding its post-WWII role in Europe. And as issues like EMU and Iraq show, the UK likes to go it alone.
In the end, I think Europe isn't going to go very far in the direction the UK wants it to, and it certainly isn't going to go in the direction you want it to. I think the only option the UK has is to decide whether it wants to be part of the EU as it is or not. If you think the EU is undemocratic and corrupt, then elect a UK government that takes the UK out of the EU
5ft tall with short legs? I kind of doubt it would work too well...
It would be quite different. Different ethnic groups and "races" are biologically almost identical to each other. But Neanderthal seems to be a different species. Having another intelligent species on the planet (again) would be a huge change for us.
"here we have a 20 year old protocol, a part of the Internet infrastructure that hasn't been touched in 10 years and we were all sure was right, and now is cast in doubt."
If "we" were all sure, then maybe the wrong people are working on internet and security. The people designing the internet weren't concerned much with adversarial nodes or any of the other ills we have today, and anybody who thinks that ICMP, routing, etc., are in any way secure is a fool. The only reason it works as well as it does is because in the places that really matter (within a single large provider network infrastructure), there is some centralized control.
But it's the system that's been deployed, everybody has to keep their eyes open for potential problems, and they need to get fixed as they get identified. Most security is being handled at a higher level now anyway (certificates, encryption, signatures, etc.), so that the primary thing we have to worry about resulting from the deficiencies of the underlying network is denial of service.
Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut?
Kaplan's complaints are warranted, based on the history of Go. And now that Microsoft's conduct has been laid bare by other lawsuits, he is trying to take advantage of that, because it does make his case simpler: it has been demonstrated clearly that Microsoft has a pattern of anti-competitive behavior, and a lot of useful Microsoft-internal information has come to light.
You've got the draw the line somewhere on employees being allowed to express personal opinions. I say the only criterion should be "Does this opinion adversely affect the employee's ability to do their job?"
That's not where we draw the line (nor do I think we should). We draw the line at "does it affect the company bottom line adversely".
Your wife's race usually doesn't affect the company bottom line adversely. However, even if it did, race and a few other factors are explicitly special cases under the law.
And we can't have people wearing crosses, stars of david, head scarves, or yin/yang symbols to work either, because "religious messages disrupt workplace harmony..."
I think that would be a very sensible policy, actually, as long as it is applied consistently to all religions within the workplace. However, like race, society has decided that this is a special case. You'd have to ask an employment lawyer, though, to find out what is legal and what is not in that area.
Is that acceptable to fire someone that voices such an opinion? I don't think so.
Think about a corporation having 20 employees struggling to get a new product out and getting more money. Now, one of its employees gives an interview and says "our product sucks; it can't even do (fill in whatever), and it won't be out in time either". I think it's justified firing that employee (whether it's legal is another question).
If the company is Microsoft or IBM, then it's a different matter. A Microsoft employee should arguably be able to say "I think Word sucks" without getting fired if he says it in a clearly private capacity. But if he's the head of the Word development team giving an interview saying "Word sucks", that would be justification for firing him.
I believe this argument was used as the justification for the private corporation that fired an employee during the U.S. presidential election primaries because the person attended a Bush rally wearing anti-Bush shirts.
That behavior is unrelated to workplace conduct or company products, so I think that's a bad justification.
If the employee wore a "Bush sucks" T-shirt to work, then the company can fire him, provided they also fire any employee wearing a "Kerry sucks" T-shirt. The justification would be "political messages disrupt workplace harmony". But the company has no business selecting one or the other political message (unless it's, say, a company with an explicitly partisan purpose).
Do you even know what a "religious fundamendalist zealot" is? I've yet to read about Bush hanging Laura in the name of God for some minor mistake she made.
You can be a "religious fundamentalist zealot" and be completely non-violent. Religious fundamentalism is about a hare-brained and intolerant interpretation of scriptures, not about homicidal tendencies (although one may lead to the other).
(Besides, has Laura even made any such "minor mistakes"?)
You have just stated that it's OK for employees to fire people for holding an opinion contrary to the opinion of the "corporation". That is a ridiculus assertion.
No, he stated that it's OK to fire people for publicly stating an opinion that is contrary to the business interests of the corporation.
Is that ridiculous? It may be, or it may not be. It depends on the nature of the statement, the nature of the business, and the relationship between the two.
I offered my opinion that the sole virtue of democracy is that it implements the will of the electorate. I asked you what the benefit of democracy was that we could discard representation of the people and still you would support it
I disagree with your premise: the EU does not "discard representation of the people" merely because many of its representatives are appointed. (I also disagree with your premise that the "sole virtue of democracy is that it implements the will of the electorate", but that's a separate debate.)
The EU system is analogous to the way most federations work: it has a directly elected lower house, an upper house consisting of members appointed by the member nations, and an appointed executive branch. That kind of arrangement is an accepted way of implementing representative democracy. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's not going to change.
Because the EU is still in its infancy, created out of a mostly economic association of sovereign governments, the lower house currently has less power than in other federal governments, but, then, the EU as a whole also has less power than a federal government. That transfer of power is intended to change gradually over time, to give everybody time to adjust.
Yes, but the MEPs are not legislators.
The MEPs are very much legislators. Not very powerful legislators, but legislators nonetheless.
Their role is advisory. They have very little power, and as has been recently demonstrated, no power that cannot be overruled. So my vote there is next to meaningless.
That's because governments, like your own, like to keep it that way. I'm sure that if the UK made a big deal out of it and said "we insist that the MEPs get more power right away", they could get other member nations to listen and perhaps change something. In actual fact, the UK government appears to be trying to push things in the opposite direction.
"The other legislative body, the Council of Ministers, consists of representatives appointed by your own national government."
Cute, but wrong. EU commisoners seem to be lifetime appointments.
You're confusing two separate parts of the EU government. The Commissioners are part of the executive branch, the Council of Ministers are part of the legislative branch. The Commissioners are not "lifetime appointments"--they serve at the leisure of the member governments, need to be approved by the President and the European Parliament, and can be ousted in a no confidence vote by MEPs.
Neil Kinnock can do what he likes - I cannot unelect him.
Your Commissioner is Peter Mandelson, not Neil Kinnock. And I suspect that if you "unelect" your government, Mandelson will be kicked out as well.
As it is - well just hit google news with "eu corruption" and see what you get back. It's hardly controversial.
All governments are corrupt to some degree or another. Search for "british corruption" and "uk corruption" and you'll get lots of hits, too. Furthermore, your premise that giving more power to the MEPs or abolishing the Council and Commissioners and replacing them (with what exactly?) would reduce corruption is unproven. More likely, more financial transparency, more responsibility of the member nations for their officials, and better supervision would be more effective than changing how those bodies are elected.
Again, I can just ask you, what do you want? Why do you keep complaining about the EU as if it were some monarch or dictator imposed from the outside? The EU does what its member governments decide it should do, no more and no less. Your democratically elected government decided that your nation should be part of the EU and helped define the way the EU operates. What's your problem with that?
If anything, the UK government is keeping the EU from being a more democratic government and instead wants to maintain it more as a loose economic association. A loose economic assoc
You're talking about how they work. I'm talking abouyt what they are supposed to do. I'm not interested in making excuses for non-representative democracies. I want fair and equal representation for everyone.
OK, so, to summarize (1) you believe that in order for a government to be called "democratic", all decision makers need to be elected by the citizens, and (2) you acknowledge that there is no government in which that is the case. Therefore, you apparently deny that democracies exist at all right now.
I'm just saying that it's pretty clear that something called "democracies" exist, that all of them have lots of unelected decision makers, so the EU is no exception. And with the European Parliament directly elected, the EU seems no less democratic than the UK, with its anachronistic Upper House.
"Furthermore, you are placing blame in the wrong place. The only people who decide who is going to represent the UK at the EU is the UK government. If you think that the selection is "undemocratic", then that's a problem internal to the UK, not a problem with the EU."
I'm not talking about the UK's role in Europe. My point concerns the unrepresentative nature of the EU. You will find that I am not the only european dissatisfied with the setup in the EU
I'm not talking about the UK's role in Europe either. I'm saying that the EU doesn't choose who represents you in the EU bodies, so you can't hold the EU responsible if you aren't happy with your representatives. The members of the European Parliament are already elected by the citizens, so you presumably had an opportunity to vote for yours. The other legislative body, the Council of Ministers, consists of representatives appointed by your own national government. If you think their choice is undemocratic, you have to take that up with your own national government; nobody but your national government has a say in that.
Furthermore, the "setup of the EU" isn't something bureaucrats in Brussels decide, it's something the national governments constituting the EU decide on. The current system (European Parliament and Council of Ministers) strikes me as pretty sensible. If you don't like it, you have to work through your government and your EU representatives to change it; as far as I can tell, your government actually opposes a greater transfer of power to the directly elected representatives, so if you consider that "undemocratic", you are sitting right at the source of those policies.
As for the EU Constitution, based on the polls preceding the referenda, people generally like the idea of an EU Constitution, they just hated this particular document. So did I. Our rejection of this Constitution is different from your apparent general Euro-fatigue.
Look on IMDB for "13th floor".