Companies don't have views. The people that work in those companies have views, and they are able to express them without paying someone to bribe politicians on their behalf.
You're right, that companies don't have views. However, they do have interests, which usually coincide with the interests of the shareholders (chiefly, the interest in making money). People who work for a corporation get paid to advance the interests of the corporation. This includes lobbyists.
Yes, their interests can be explained with words alone. But convincing a lawmaker that your interests are more important to him than others' conflicting interests is a lot easier when your words are accompanied by cash.
Maybe, just maybe, mommy and daddy did their work and considered Gmail safe.
Then they should get a failing grade on their work. The only way Gmail can be considered safe for kids (going by these parents' desire to avoid sexually-charged content) is if you whitelist incoming and outgoing mails with parental control over the lists and then monitor every incoming mail for content before allowing the kid to read it.
Instead these parents wanted Google to do their job for them.
Now, I'm all for companies acting responsibly and providing tools for parental controls to help parents. But ultimately it is up to parents to implement these tools, and where they are not present, come up with their own methods to implement controls.
Older "parenting skills": 1) Place child in yard. 2) Go back to whatever you were doing 3) Whup the kids if they get back after dinnertime.
Here's the thing... a lot of parents just don't understand that letting their kids use the internet unsupervised puts them in potential contact with EVERY person who also has internet access. Period.
This requires fundamental differences in how child's play is supervised, if you wish to avoid the headaches unfettered internet access creates. Because of the limited (and/or different) danger posed by other recreational activities, parents need to understand that they need to be much, much more participatory in internet activity with their kids than with other things their kids do.
Unfortunately, many parents either don't realize this, don't make the time for it, or don't care.
TOYOTA took the opposite position of refusing to admit problems existed, and stuck their customers with ~$7000 bills to replace 20,000 mile engines.
You know, I read through about 6 pages of the complaints posted, and you're clearly exaggerating on the number of miles and the cost of the repairs. This is a discredit to your entire argument, and I'm not going to waste my time discussing this with someone who has a very tenuous grasp on facts, figures, and truth.
Hey, not that it has anything to do with anything, but Rob is ripping the one-liners attached to article summaries today.
This article: I expect them to announce Silverlight Thursday.
The Novell/SCO article: No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.
The NASA/Toyota article: We're really in trouble when NASA has no choice but to call Bruce Willis.
The slow-people-down-with-obstacles-article: All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
Is CmdrTaco giddy with anticipation of some giant prank for Thursday? If he on the gigglejuice? Is he just happy spring is here?
Who knows... but it's nice to see some light-hearted editorialization for a change.
And, now, rightfully so, please mod this post into oblivion.
You are belittling a woman who is active in the political arena and is espousing a point of view you disagree with. Rather than addressing her point of view with any intelligent arguments you attempt to dismiss her point of view by calling her a name.
Those who show themselves worthy of ridicule will be ridiculed.
Deal with it.
FWIW, I believe everyone, myself included, is deserving of ridicule. She put herself in the public eye, and both she and you need to come to terms with the fact that people will ridicule her for being a hunter, an ignoramus, and a former beauty pageant contestant. This is the price you pay for stepping up onto a national stage.
Repeal the 17th Amendment; turn the Senators back into wards of the State Legislatures.
There are reasons the 17th Amendment was passed. I, for one, can not *stand* the thought of my state legislature having any more power. Then again, I live in NJ, so YMMV in re: quality of Legislatures.
What's really needed is for elected officials to be accountable on the local scale. How many people does each House member represent? It used to be 30,000... now it's roughly 500,000. Even at the state level, legislators do not need to answer to their communities. NJ has approximately 8,000,000 people and 40 state senators -- that's one senator per 200,000 people. The ratio is high enough that mass media overpowers community accountability.
You know what I'd like to see? Federal Senators/Reps being required to spend 320 days a year in their home state, and forbidden from living in gated communities. Use technology to conduct remote legislative sessions. This would help with accountability, since you wouldn't have to go to DC to visit your Senator/Rep's office.
And one more addition... no elected official should have any (non-salary) benefit greater than the minimum (non-salary) benefit offered for workers in their state.
You mean like the USA circa 1820s. We seemed to do okay.
hahahaha. Nice rose-colored reading glasses you have there.
It took about 200 years but the leaders have successfully restored the monarchy/nobility. True it's an elected monarchy/nobility, but still the same old Medieval-style power structure.
Since when has it been any different? The people with money and connections have always wielded the most power and influence. This was as true, if not more so, in the 1820s as in today. Only the availability of cheap land in the west made the 1820s possibly more egalitarian than today.
The power structure has never changed. If you think that two hundred years ago we had some utopia of equality, even among white males, you're sorely misinformed.
You refute his link that says ~51% percent of spending is on past and present military expenditures, and the details you give are:
The highest I've seen elsewhere was on CNBC where they report 42 cents of every dollar goes to the military, 28.7 cents to current spending, 10 cents to interest on past and present military debt and 3.5 cents to Veterans.
Funny... 5 minutes of googling via site:cnbc.com could not come up with anything to support your figures. Furthermore, if you actually bothered reading the rest of the page from that link, you'd see that the graph creator laid out the specific reasons why there are variations in the amount calculated.
The link to the NY Times... well, apples to oranges, since the breakdown you link to includes medicare, social security, etc, which are accounted for separately. Was addressed in the warresistors link.
I call BS on the story about commercial tax rates but I currently don't have the time or inclination to find evidence to back up my claim.
If you call BS, the onus is on you to provide the reason why. If you don't have the time or inclination to do so, then don't call bullshit. It just makes you look even more the fool.
There's a simpler answer: The "45 million uninsured Americans" that politicians kept talking about actually ARE insured - by the government's existing programs. You're old, or you're a child, and when you enter the hospital you are instantly signed-up for Medicare or SCHIP. That drops the number to about 20 million instantly.
Please provide a citation for that. No figures I have been able to find agree with that number.
Also the stats come from about 5,000 mail-in surveys from voluntary respondents (the other persons threw-out the surveys). NOT an accurate scientific polling, therefore the "45 mil" number is invalid. It's no better than a guess.
There have been other analyses, more rigorous, that come up with figures in the same ballpark. Are you trying to discredit all those studies as well by lumping them in with one dubious study (which, of course, you exaggerate the dubiousness of)?
But of course you don't want to hear it.
I DO want to hear it... this is why I asked you to provide a citation. Especially when you used an appeal to authority in your OP, that you can't actually back up with a citation to that authority ("actual scientists").
If you can't provide meaningful citations for your out-of-whack claims, I'll just continue to assume that you're pulling numbers out of the blogosphere or your ass in order to support your position.
I don't consider running fiber optics to be a "natural" monopoly. Fiber is cheap - and the metal pipes are already under the street. If a new competitor like Google wants to start supplying hookups, all they have to do is run the fiber through the pipe to any customer who requests Google TV or Internet.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is conduit under public streets that anyone can run fiber through free of charge?
And it's not just the fiber, there's all the other infrastructure required, as well as having service crews for the lines, etc.
There are a lot of fixed costs for fiber or cable, and this is what makes them a natural monopoly.
In fact there are some towns that DO have two competing cable companies, thereby giving customers a choice.
Yes, now that cable can also serve voice and internet, there's more money to be made, and so more opportunity for a second-past-the-post company to be able to operate profitably.
But it's laughable to think it's economically feasible to have twelve competing companies, all with redundant infrastructure. The only way you're going to get that is if the fiber/cable is publicly or privately held by an organization who operates only as a backbone -- and everyone serving the end-user can lease space on equal terms. Even then, you're not likely to have twelve competitors, due to other fixed costs.
FWIW, Victorinox is a slightly different company that Digitrade or Innmax. They have a long history and a proud brand reputation. I'm more likely to believe them than most other companies that produce USB sticks.
I don't think sticking the severed finger in a microwave or oven constitutes "Hollywood methods". It's pretty intuitive and a lot faster/more convenient than a loud/long process of torturing someone.
Better yet, why bother with the microwave? That would be an unneeded hassle (and somewhat suspicious, if in a public area). Instead, stash the finger in one of your body's seemingly-designed-for-this warm orifices, the surreptitiously remove it when it's time to use it.
It also depends on how they are hired. If the papers they sign state that they are responsible for their own actions, it would get WB out of any counter-lawsuits for thing done.
No. In the US, anyway, WB cannot sign away their liability for having their employees do things that are illegal or would make them subject to civil action. As agents of WB, those kids might be liable -- but WB would still be liable.
Sorry to take it to the extreme -- but if I hire someone to kill my wife, and have them sign a contract stating they are fully liable for the action and indemnify me of any liability... well, guess what... I'm still liable.
Instead of having kids with my wife, which would produce another smart honkey but a bit on the short and short sighted side, i would find sperm and egg donors.
You do know, of course, that offspring of your union are likely to regress to the mean, and be less smart than either of you, right?
This is why I've chosen only below-average-intelligence women to be my baby mommas, so that I'll be more likely to have genius children.
Well, that, and they are the only ones who will sleep with me.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not kidding. He's just insane.
You're right, that companies don't have views. However, they do have interests, which usually coincide with the interests of the shareholders (chiefly, the interest in making money). People who work for a corporation get paid to advance the interests of the corporation. This includes lobbyists.
Yes, their interests can be explained with words alone. But convincing a lawmaker that your interests are more important to him than others' conflicting interests is a lot easier when your words are accompanied by cash.
Then they should get a failing grade on their work. The only way Gmail can be considered safe for kids (going by these parents' desire to avoid sexually-charged content) is if you whitelist incoming and outgoing mails with parental control over the lists and then monitor every incoming mail for content before allowing the kid to read it.
Instead these parents wanted Google to do their job for them.
Now, I'm all for companies acting responsibly and providing tools for parental controls to help parents. But ultimately it is up to parents to implement these tools, and where they are not present, come up with their own methods to implement controls.
Meh. You left out a few, here's one:
Older "parenting skills": 1) Place child in yard. 2) Go back to whatever you were doing 3) Whup the kids if they get back after dinnertime.
Here's the thing... a lot of parents just don't understand that letting their kids use the internet unsupervised puts them in potential contact with EVERY person who also has internet access. Period.
This requires fundamental differences in how child's play is supervised, if you wish to avoid the headaches unfettered internet access creates. Because of the limited (and/or different) danger posed by other recreational activities, parents need to understand that they need to be much, much more participatory in internet activity with their kids than with other things their kids do.
Unfortunately, many parents either don't realize this, don't make the time for it, or don't care.
You know, I read through about 6 pages of the complaints posted, and you're clearly exaggerating on the number of miles and the cost of the repairs. This is a discredit to your entire argument, and I'm not going to waste my time discussing this with someone who has a very tenuous grasp on facts, figures, and truth.
Hey, not that it has anything to do with anything, but Rob is ripping the one-liners attached to article summaries today.
This article:
I expect them to announce Silverlight Thursday.
The Novell/SCO article:
No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.
The NASA/Toyota article:
We're really in trouble when NASA has no choice but to call Bruce Willis.
The slow-people-down-with-obstacles-article:
All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
Is CmdrTaco giddy with anticipation of some giant prank for Thursday? If he on the gigglejuice? Is he just happy spring is here?
Who knows... but it's nice to see some light-hearted editorialization for a change.
And, now, rightfully so, please mod this post into oblivion.
It's disingenuous to single out Toyota when so many other major car makers habve a similar track record.
Here's a primer to help anyone who thinks that the arrogance of car manufacturers is limted to Toyota.
Of note, check out numbers 1&2 on the list... exploding Fords again (albeit just spitting a spark plug, not a fuel tank explosion).
No, silly. Spin is independent of charge. Though one should not use the concepts of "negative" or "positive" with relation to spin.
The key here is that Toyota can make it hard for consumers to quantify their culpability.
Obviously there have been analogs to Philosophy 101 since the dawn of human time.
So maybe it just helped Thag get laid by the cave-woman bimbos during ooga-ooga-campfire-philosophy-exposition-seminar?
Meh. Stop trying to "win" debates by making the discussion revolve around the "rules of debate" instead of what is actually being discussed.
OP made a jingoistic post, responder replied in kind.
Is there a reason you felt the need to White Knight the OP in a meaningless mention of debating rules?
Are you claiming that the OP made some kind of statement that can be evaluated as true or false in the context of a debate? Because he surely didn't.
Those who show themselves worthy of ridicule will be ridiculed.
Deal with it.
FWIW, I believe everyone, myself included, is deserving of ridicule. She put herself in the public eye, and both she and you need to come to terms with the fact that people will ridicule her for being a hunter, an ignoramus, and a former beauty pageant contestant. This is the price you pay for stepping up onto a national stage.
There are reasons the 17th Amendment was passed. I, for one, can not *stand* the thought of my state legislature having any more power. Then again, I live in NJ, so YMMV in re: quality of Legislatures.
What's really needed is for elected officials to be accountable on the local scale. How many people does each House member represent? It used to be 30,000... now it's roughly 500,000. Even at the state level, legislators do not need to answer to their communities. NJ has approximately 8,000,000 people and 40 state senators -- that's one senator per 200,000 people. The ratio is high enough that mass media overpowers community accountability.
You know what I'd like to see? Federal Senators/Reps being required to spend 320 days a year in their home state, and forbidden from living in gated communities. Use technology to conduct remote legislative sessions. This would help with accountability, since you wouldn't have to go to DC to visit your Senator/Rep's office.
And one more addition... no elected official should have any (non-salary) benefit greater than the minimum (non-salary) benefit offered for workers in their state.
hahahaha. Nice rose-colored reading glasses you have there.
Since when has it been any different? The people with money and connections have always wielded the most power and influence. This was as true, if not more so, in the 1820s as in today. Only the availability of cheap land in the west made the 1820s possibly more egalitarian than today.
The power structure has never changed. If you think that two hundred years ago we had some utopia of equality, even among white males, you're sorely misinformed.
Good luck with that. C64love always has "facts" to support his arguments but very rarely can provide any kind of source for his "facts".
You have a better chance of getting laid by the bimbos in Philosophy 101?
You refute his link that says ~51% percent of spending is on past and present military expenditures, and the details you give are:
Funny... 5 minutes of googling via site:cnbc.com could not come up with anything to support your figures. Furthermore, if you actually bothered reading the rest of the page from that link, you'd see that the graph creator laid out the specific reasons why there are variations in the amount calculated.
The link to the NY Times... well, apples to oranges, since the breakdown you link to includes medicare, social security, etc, which are accounted for separately. Was addressed in the warresistors link.
If you call BS, the onus is on you to provide the reason why. If you don't have the time or inclination to do so, then don't call bullshit. It just makes you look even more the fool.
Please provide a citation for that. No figures I have been able to find agree with that number.
There have been other analyses, more rigorous, that come up with figures in the same ballpark. Are you trying to discredit all those studies as well by lumping them in with one dubious study (which, of course, you exaggerate the dubiousness of)?
I DO want to hear it... this is why I asked you to provide a citation. Especially when you used an appeal to authority in your OP, that you can't actually back up with a citation to that authority ("actual scientists").
If you can't provide meaningful citations for your out-of-whack claims, I'll just continue to assume that you're pulling numbers out of the blogosphere or your ass in order to support your position.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is conduit under public streets that anyone can run fiber through free of charge?
And it's not just the fiber, there's all the other infrastructure required, as well as having service crews for the lines, etc.
There are a lot of fixed costs for fiber or cable, and this is what makes them a natural monopoly.
Yes, now that cable can also serve voice and internet, there's more money to be made, and so more opportunity for a second-past-the-post company to be able to operate profitably.
But it's laughable to think it's economically feasible to have twelve competing companies, all with redundant infrastructure. The only way you're going to get that is if the fiber/cable is publicly or privately held by an organization who operates only as a backbone -- and everyone serving the end-user can lease space on equal terms. Even then, you're not likely to have twelve competitors, due to other fixed costs.
FWIW, Victorinox is a slightly different company that Digitrade or Innmax. They have a long history and a proud brand reputation. I'm more likely to believe them than most other companies that produce USB sticks.
Better yet, why bother with the microwave? That would be an unneeded hassle (and somewhat suspicious, if in a public area). Instead, stash the finger in one of your body's seemingly-designed-for-this warm orifices, the surreptitiously remove it when it's time to use it.
Parent:
That's only a fallacy on GP's part if you think the west won the war in Vietnam.
No. In the US, anyway, WB cannot sign away their liability for having their employees do things that are illegal or would make them subject to civil action. As agents of WB, those kids might be liable -- but WB would still be liable.
Sorry to take it to the extreme -- but if I hire someone to kill my wife, and have them sign a contract stating they are fully liable for the action and indemnify me of any liability... well, guess what... I'm still liable.
You do know, of course, that offspring of your union are likely to regress to the mean, and be less smart than either of you, right?
This is why I've chosen only below-average-intelligence women to be my baby mommas, so that I'll be more likely to have genius children.
Well, that, and they are the only ones who will sleep with me.
75% success rate of what, exactly?
Getting laid on my birthday?
That, I could believe.