Seriously - I have no interest in reasoning with people who are basic rejectionists of the scientific method. Kierkegaard taught me that people of faith and the insane are functionally indistinguishable.
The fact is that electing Bush as President has put in place a far more moralizing attitude within the attorney general's office and other enforcement-related branches of the government. I may personally find scat porn, BDSM, etc. distasteful, disgusting or even offensive or demeaning, but if you want to do that in the privacy of your own home, that's your business. I think the vast majority of democrats (Hillary and a small cadre of "save-the-children" panderers aside).
You missed the point. It's not a mistake, it has a common usage of the word in a grammatically distinct role in colloquial American English. It may be a particularly grating one, but a linguist would say it is no more or less "right" or "wrong" than any other linguistic development.
The American Heritage dictionary lists it as an informal usage at this point and explains the subtleties of its meaning in this form in an explanatory note. See dictionary.com's entry for more.
Remember that English is just a fallen/corrupted/dirtied mix of German dialects with a healthy mix of Romance (Latin-derived) influence. There's nothing so pristine about it to begin with.
Perhaps you are confused. Warner Music Group controls two of the approximately 25 board seats of the RIAA Board of Directors. They had revenues of 3 billion dollars last year and a market cap of 2.7 billion. They are considered one of the "Big Four" (EMI, Sony-BMG, Universal Music, and Warner) music publishers responsible for 95% of all music CDs sold worldwide. The Big Four were convicted (along with some smaller players) of price fixing and forced to settle with 43 states attorney generals in 2003.
So Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is the CEO of one of the Big Four music publishers, part of a proven price fixing cartel, and one of the major controlling organizations of the RIAA, a "trade group" (i.e. cartel) that ruthlessly pursues anybody who's interests aren't aligned with the publishers.
My personal favorite is that "the market" should decide. Apparently this guy failed introductory microeconomics - when you are a monopoly supplier (or a cartel) "the market" doesn't decide anything, the monopolist looks at the demand curve and sets a profit maximizing price. Sometimes they decide they've been too generous in the past, and having roped consumers into a new distribution channel, it's time to start jacking up prices again as perhaps demand isn't quite so elastic as they had previously thought.
Also, he has apparently never taken Strategy 101, or been introduced to the Theory of Complements - iPods and iTMS (and the downloadable music it distributes) are a classic example of complements. Just because Apple has for ONCE actually played a situation intelligently from a strategic perspective and the music industry has yet again failed to do so (monopolies rarely have any incentive to act strategically) doesn't give them a right to shit.
This diatribe can be simplified into "a company that is not us is making profits in something vaguely related to music and we don't like that". After I finish wiping away the tears of sorrow from my eyes, allow me to say how many nano-give-a-shits I have for this guys problems.
"Very hard" is perhaps an understatement. If you want to understand how hard, read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. A whole book wrestling with the concept of what faith means and how an intelligent person could ever have it. It's a bit depressing in a way - my takeaway is that faith, in the broad Kierkegaardian sense, and reason are inherently incompatible. You can say you "believe in God" as a man of reason, but what you mean by that phrase and what your average irrational religious zealot type mean by it are guaranteed to be radically different.
Actually, a linguist would tell you this is just the natural way language evolves. What you call a grammatical error in the second case, a linguist would call the creation and adoption of a new word to fill an important gap in the language. Previously, there was no simple way to communicate the concept of informal or inexact quotation - in other words, when you aren't quoting a person but paraphrasing their responses or words. It is quite awkward to say "He said something along the lines of..." or "He said something like..." repeatedly, so the phrase "He was like..." developed in response to a clear need in the language, which I think in part explains its rapid adoption around the US (though still stronger in certain regions, perhaps) and its stickiness as an informal usage.
The former example, take vs. bring, is a case in which a distinction between two similar words is so obscure as to be effectively meaningless for most communications. That one may be considered "proper" by a grammarian is irrelevant to a linguist if both easily communicate the same concept to a speaker of the language. This is one way in which language regularly evolves.
I appreciate that certain usages may sound grating on the ears to somebody who had that particular point beaten into their head as a schoolchild (i.e. take vs. bring). But this is part of the continuous process of linguistic evolution, NOT some sudden degradation in American English indicative of the downfall of our society.
Somebody who declares their intention to destroy the very fabric of our society doesn't have much of a claim to the protections provided by that society, do they? If only it were that easy to find terrorists, I wouldn't have much of a problem with locking them up in Guantanamo without a trial. Of course in real life it's generally not so clear.
But honestly, why do you think your right to free speech means a right to no consequences? It's illegal to incite violence, it's illegal to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, and you're going to be arrested if you seriously state your intentions to commit terrorist acts. If you are just an ass and wear a pro-bin Laden t-shirt to piss people off, you might be arrested for your own protection to prevent a mob of angry New Yorkers from beating you to death.
There are legitimate complaints about the disintegration of our right to privacy under the PATRIOT Act and so forth, but I don't think your example is a great one of erosion of free speech rights.
Yes, really! For example, the sine of theta is defined in analysis as the y component of the radial vector from the origin to a point in a circle of unit radius whose arc distance from the x-axis is theta. The cosine of theta is defined similarly but this time taking the x-component. From this two simple definitions, the entire panoply of the trigonometric identities can be usefully derived!
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I assume you realize that that your "analytic definition" is logically identical but simply more of a mouthful than "The sine of an angle is the length of the opposite side divided by the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle constructed with that angle at one end", which is simply the full form of "Sine is opposite over hypotenuse", as immortalized in the mnemonic SOHCAHTOA.
I personally fail to see how much more intuitive it could be to work in squared units all the time, no matter how cutesy the names you give to them are. You simply the relationships at the expense of complicating the underlying units and their "intuitive" relationship to real world observables. Personally, I think it's a bad tradeoff, but if helps you learn the material, then more power to you.
Oh please. And when 1000+ Iraqis dies in a stampede, was God warning them? What about at Mecca when thousands used to die in the pilgrimage every year? Was he warning them too? Or when the monsoon is particularly bad and hits Indonesia, drowning 10s of thousands? Or when a tsunami kills hundreds of thousands in south asia?
Natural disasters hit areas. Sometimes they hit without warning and everybody dies. Sometimes we have warning and the poorest and dumbest tend to die, like happened in New Orleans. Such is life, and the US isn't immune though it is generally more well-prepared and equipped to handle them than other nations.
Umm, a rather large quantity of theoretical and applied work in fields ranging from computer science (quantum computing, 3D graphics) and astronomy (cataclysmic variable binary star systems) to quantitative finance (improved tail-sensitive alternatives to VaR for highly kurtotic equity markets). I've published several papers and conference presentations, assisted with several others, started and sold a software company that made a successful niche product for financial markets and worked at a well-respected hedge fund.
How about you, Mr. Anonymous Coward? What have you produced lately? Don't start blabbing your mouth if you have no clue who you're talking to.
Now back to the main point: how many of those papers build on original principles of Mr. Wolfram's as their key aspects, and how many simply reference it as a popular summary and overview of cellular automata?
While I agree with you, the programmers I've had work for me with no theoretical background are usually pretty bad programmers. The good programmers usually had a pretty strong theoretical background. Of course, it's not a necessary and sufficient condition - I have met a few with strong theoretical knowledge and poor practical programming skills.
But I've almost never met a *great* programmer (i.e. somebody who can independently design and develop complicated solutions and implement them efficiently) without a pretty strong theoretical background. That doesn't mean you absolutely *need* a formal education, some people are great autodidacts and can learn even theory on their own, but a formal education in CS is a good way for your average bright person to achieve this goal.
Of course, a good liberal education ought to be a prerequisite for citizenship and your other responsibilities to yourself and mankind. College isn't vocational school, and if they teach you properly how to learn and assimilate information, then picking up the skills you need for a particular job should be a piece of cake.
I'm sorry, but those referenced quotes were 100% pure hubris. There is no reason to believe any one of them is motivated by anything other than irrational self-aggrandizement. If you can point me to a journal article that physicists agree is bringing us closer to a unified theory of everything that 1) uses computational theory, cellular automata and similar constructs and 2) references a single work by Steven Wolfram and 3) builds fundamentally on Wolfram's work, then I will gladly be proved wrong.
Otherwise the guy is blowing smoke out his own asshole.
Burying the city with dirt wouldn't help. The problem is that the city is sinking because it's in a river delta - it would still keep sinking even with some dirt, concrete reinforced blocks, etc. on top, so you'd just postpone the problem coming back again for a few years.
You either have to accept the crappy location and elevation and build better, more expensive defenses every 20-30 years, or you move the city (or rather, as much of the residential areas as you can) to higher, more stable ground.
When you agree to a legally binding contract on the reverse of a ticket, you are agreeing to a contract of adhesion, not a signed contract. The parameters for what sort of terms are enforceable in a contract of adhesion are much more narrow. Basically any terms that a normal person would not reasonably ever expect to find in such a contract are unenforceable. If the back of the ticket says "by purchasing this ticket for our professional soccer game, you hereby agree never to play pickup soccer again", you can safely bet that term is unenforceable and illegal.
These same standards are unfortunately not being held to EULAs, click through or otherwise. It throws away centuries of common law practice and jurisprudence in the interest of pandering to special interests (the packaged, mass-market software industry).
I don't get it... as far as I can see from his images, they didn't "embed" his content or hotlink it per se. What they did was open it in a new window (not hotlinking), but hide the URL bar so as to "obscure" (poorly) the fact that the content was on another site entirely. So was it misleading? Yes, somewhat. Was it hotlinking, in the usual sense? No.
Was it impolite and deceitful? Definitely, but not much more so than the response.
Your post is seriously misleading or pure hyperbole. Do you think you can back your claim up with some statistics on the expenses incurred by pharmaceutical companies?
I realize that marketing drugs is a major activity of big pharma, but your claim about where innovation goes on and where drug candidates are developed and how they are developed shows complete ignorance about the complexity of the process and the sorts of risks that companies assume in the process of taking thousands of drug candidates through to bring one or two viable drugs to market.
This is the dumbest allocation of taxpayer dollars I've ever heard of. They should just sell the things for market price (get somebody to eBay them for 250-300 bucks a pop) and put that money back into school coffers so that it benefits all the taxpayers.
Doing this (giving away several hundred dollar laptops for 50 bucks) benefits the 1000 people who happened to show up earliest on this particular day to this sale at the expense of every other taxpayer in the county. And, as you pointed out, the cost when you factor in added police hours, chaos, potential lawsuits from trampling victims, makes this more likely to cost the taxpayers more than was earned back anyway.
I hate to be a stickler for details, but neo-conservatives aren't anti-science, and are generally considered social moderates. It's the religious, social conservative masses that voted for Bush (his political base) that are anti-science.
The Bush regime uses these scientific issues to pander to their base, while they pull the wool over their eyes about how they are screwing up the economy and sending their children (i.e. the children of poor, rural Christian conservatives who make up a large portion of the armed services) to go do the dying in Iraq.
I agree, my metric is usually anything that I know needs more than about 10 seconds of somebody's attention should be sent by email. I'll IM somebody to point something quick out or ask a one off question, but for a detailed analysis or extensive comments, it's always going to be email. Long or thoughtful IMs just don't get read most of the time.
That was the entire point of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to establish a clearer chain of accountability and hold a CEO and the Directors responsible. Contrary to what you may hear in the popular press, this accountability has always been there, and S-O just reinforces it. When we had an unfortunate incident with a very large check from a customer that bounced at my former company (I was a founder and an executive, but not the CEO and was no longer serving in a voting Board seat), I was threatened by our bank and told that I would be named in a lawsuit to collect the monies, and that all the executives and the board members would be held jointly and severally liable in the State of Massachusetts.
And this was for something that wasn't even any of our faults, but rather happened because a customer wrote a very large check that they knew was bad.
The issue is that sometimes as companies get particularly large, the question of who is responsible for what and who knows what becomes a bit more muddy, which is what S-O attempts to address. The solution is not to do away with the separation between labor and capital and remove the ability to use pooled resources, to sell equity and so on - basically completely destroy all the great tools that capitalism provides us to grow our economy. That would be incredibly foolish.
For the most part, the laws are on the books, it's just a matter of enforcing them properly, and tweaking some rules to make sure that there is always *somebody* to be held accountable if a company does bad things.
The whole point of ethanol is that there are far better ways of producing fuel-use ethanol than corn fermentation, which has been debated for years in terms of its energy efficiency.
The enthusiasm for ethanol by real scientists is from the very promising means for producing ethanol from cellulose-based feedstocks, in other words from cheap plentiful surplus materials. While this wasn't cost-effective as an energy alternative when gas cost 80 cents a gallon, at 2.25-2.50 a gallon, cellulosic ethanol is quite competitive on a dollar-per-mile basis, and it can extract energy from cheap, easy to grow feedstocks or waste-cellulose material that would otherwise end up in municipal garbage dumps.
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No, the fact that 55% of our country believe that God created man in his exact current form has relegated the Democratic party to semi-permanent minority status. The Democratic party: the party for the other 45% of us.
Seriously - I have no interest in reasoning with people who are basic rejectionists of the scientific method. Kierkegaard taught me that people of faith and the insane are functionally indistinguishable.
The fact is that electing Bush as President has put in place a far more moralizing attitude within the attorney general's office and other enforcement-related branches of the government. I may personally find scat porn, BDSM, etc. distasteful, disgusting or even offensive or demeaning, but if you want to do that in the privacy of your own home, that's your business. I think the vast majority of democrats (Hillary and a small cadre of "save-the-children" panderers aside).
You missed the point. It's not a mistake, it has a common usage of the word in a grammatically distinct role in colloquial American English. It may be a particularly grating one, but a linguist would say it is no more or less "right" or "wrong" than any other linguistic development.
The American Heritage dictionary lists it as an informal usage at this point and explains the subtleties of its meaning in this form in an explanatory note. See dictionary.com's entry for more.
Remember that English is just a fallen/corrupted/dirtied mix of German dialects with a healthy mix of Romance (Latin-derived) influence. There's nothing so pristine about it to begin with.
Perhaps you are confused. Warner Music Group controls two of the approximately 25 board seats of the RIAA Board of Directors. They had revenues of 3 billion dollars last year and a market cap of 2.7 billion. They are considered one of the "Big Four" (EMI, Sony-BMG, Universal Music, and Warner) music publishers responsible for 95% of all music CDs sold worldwide. The Big Four were convicted (along with some smaller players) of price fixing and forced to settle with 43 states attorney generals in 2003.
So Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is the CEO of one of the Big Four music publishers, part of a proven price fixing cartel, and one of the major controlling organizations of the RIAA, a "trade group" (i.e. cartel) that ruthlessly pursues anybody who's interests aren't aligned with the publishers.
What were you saying again?
My personal favorite is that "the market" should decide. Apparently this guy failed introductory microeconomics - when you are a monopoly supplier (or a cartel) "the market" doesn't decide anything, the monopolist looks at the demand curve and sets a profit maximizing price. Sometimes they decide they've been too generous in the past, and having roped consumers into a new distribution channel, it's time to start jacking up prices again as perhaps demand isn't quite so elastic as they had previously thought.
Also, he has apparently never taken Strategy 101, or been introduced to the Theory of Complements - iPods and iTMS (and the downloadable music it distributes) are a classic example of complements. Just because Apple has for ONCE actually played a situation intelligently from a strategic perspective and the music industry has yet again failed to do so (monopolies rarely have any incentive to act strategically) doesn't give them a right to shit.
This diatribe can be simplified into "a company that is not us is making profits in something vaguely related to music and we don't like that". After I finish wiping away the tears of sorrow from my eyes, allow me to say how many nano-give-a-shits I have for this guys problems.
"Very hard" is perhaps an understatement. If you want to understand how hard, read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. A whole book wrestling with the concept of what faith means and how an intelligent person could ever have it. It's a bit depressing in a way - my takeaway is that faith, in the broad Kierkegaardian sense, and reason are inherently incompatible. You can say you "believe in God" as a man of reason, but what you mean by that phrase and what your average irrational religious zealot type mean by it are guaranteed to be radically different.
Actually, a linguist would tell you this is just the natural way language evolves. What you call a grammatical error in the second case, a linguist would call the creation and adoption of a new word to fill an important gap in the language. Previously, there was no simple way to communicate the concept of informal or inexact quotation - in other words, when you aren't quoting a person but paraphrasing their responses or words. It is quite awkward to say "He said something along the lines of..." or "He said something like..." repeatedly, so the phrase "He was like..." developed in response to a clear need in the language, which I think in part explains its rapid adoption around the US (though still stronger in certain regions, perhaps) and its stickiness as an informal usage.
The former example, take vs. bring, is a case in which a distinction between two similar words is so obscure as to be effectively meaningless for most communications. That one may be considered "proper" by a grammarian is irrelevant to a linguist if both easily communicate the same concept to a speaker of the language. This is one way in which language regularly evolves.
I appreciate that certain usages may sound grating on the ears to somebody who had that particular point beaten into their head as a schoolchild (i.e. take vs. bring). But this is part of the continuous process of linguistic evolution, NOT some sudden degradation in American English indicative of the downfall of our society.
Somebody who declares their intention to destroy the very fabric of our society doesn't have much of a claim to the protections provided by that society, do they? If only it were that easy to find terrorists, I wouldn't have much of a problem with locking them up in Guantanamo without a trial. Of course in real life it's generally not so clear.
But honestly, why do you think your right to free speech means a right to no consequences? It's illegal to incite violence, it's illegal to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, and you're going to be arrested if you seriously state your intentions to commit terrorist acts. If you are just an ass and wear a pro-bin Laden t-shirt to piss people off, you might be arrested for your own protection to prevent a mob of angry New Yorkers from beating you to death.
There are legitimate complaints about the disintegration of our right to privacy under the PATRIOT Act and so forth, but I don't think your example is a great one of erosion of free speech rights.
Yes, really! For example, the sine of theta is defined in analysis as the y component of the radial vector from the origin to a point in a circle of unit radius whose arc distance from the x-axis is theta. The cosine of theta is defined similarly but this time taking the x-component. From this two simple definitions, the entire panoply of the trigonometric identities can be usefully derived!
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I assume you realize that that your "analytic definition" is logically identical but simply more of a mouthful than "The sine of an angle is the length of the opposite side divided by the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle constructed with that angle at one end", which is simply the full form of "Sine is opposite over hypotenuse", as immortalized in the mnemonic SOHCAHTOA.
I personally fail to see how much more intuitive it could be to work in squared units all the time, no matter how cutesy the names you give to them are. You simply the relationships at the expense of complicating the underlying units and their "intuitive" relationship to real world observables. Personally, I think it's a bad tradeoff, but if helps you learn the material, then more power to you.
Can we get some synergies here while we're at it?
Oh please. And when 1000+ Iraqis dies in a stampede, was God warning them? What about at Mecca when thousands used to die in the pilgrimage every year? Was he warning them too? Or when the monsoon is particularly bad and hits Indonesia, drowning 10s of thousands? Or when a tsunami kills hundreds of thousands in south asia?
Natural disasters hit areas. Sometimes they hit without warning and everybody dies. Sometimes we have warning and the poorest and dumbest tend to die, like happened in New Orleans. Such is life, and the US isn't immune though it is generally more well-prepared and equipped to handle them than other nations.
What have you produced lately?
Umm, a rather large quantity of theoretical and applied work in fields ranging from computer science (quantum computing, 3D graphics) and astronomy (cataclysmic variable binary star systems) to quantitative finance (improved tail-sensitive alternatives to VaR for highly kurtotic equity markets). I've published several papers and conference presentations, assisted with several others, started and sold a software company that made a successful niche product for financial markets and worked at a well-respected hedge fund.
How about you, Mr. Anonymous Coward? What have you produced lately? Don't start blabbing your mouth if you have no clue who you're talking to.
Now back to the main point: how many of those papers build on original principles of Mr. Wolfram's as their key aspects, and how many simply reference it as a popular summary and overview of cellular automata?
While I agree with you, the programmers I've had work for me with no theoretical background are usually pretty bad programmers. The good programmers usually had a pretty strong theoretical background. Of course, it's not a necessary and sufficient condition - I have met a few with strong theoretical knowledge and poor practical programming skills.
But I've almost never met a *great* programmer (i.e. somebody who can independently design and develop complicated solutions and implement them efficiently) without a pretty strong theoretical background. That doesn't mean you absolutely *need* a formal education, some people are great autodidacts and can learn even theory on their own, but a formal education in CS is a good way for your average bright person to achieve this goal.
Of course, a good liberal education ought to be a prerequisite for citizenship and your other responsibilities to yourself and mankind. College isn't vocational school, and if they teach you properly how to learn and assimilate information, then picking up the skills you need for a particular job should be a piece of cake.
I'm sorry, but those referenced quotes were 100% pure hubris. There is no reason to believe any one of them is motivated by anything other than irrational self-aggrandizement. If you can point me to a journal article that physicists agree is bringing us closer to a unified theory of everything that 1) uses computational theory, cellular automata and similar constructs and 2) references a single work by Steven Wolfram and 3) builds fundamentally on Wolfram's work, then I will gladly be proved wrong.
Otherwise the guy is blowing smoke out his own asshole.
The scary part about that site is the link to this: http://cesweb.org/attendees/awards/innovations/rd_ 2005honorees.asp?category=48 - yes, that's right kids, they got an award in the Computer Components category at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) for a completely fictitious product. A-fricking-mazing.
Burying the city with dirt wouldn't help. The problem is that the city is sinking because it's in a river delta - it would still keep sinking even with some dirt, concrete reinforced blocks, etc. on top, so you'd just postpone the problem coming back again for a few years.
You either have to accept the crappy location and elevation and build better, more expensive defenses every 20-30 years, or you move the city (or rather, as much of the residential areas as you can) to higher, more stable ground.
When you agree to a legally binding contract on the reverse of a ticket, you are agreeing to a contract of adhesion, not a signed contract. The parameters for what sort of terms are enforceable in a contract of adhesion are much more narrow. Basically any terms that a normal person would not reasonably ever expect to find in such a contract are unenforceable. If the back of the ticket says "by purchasing this ticket for our professional soccer game, you hereby agree never to play pickup soccer again", you can safely bet that term is unenforceable and illegal.
These same standards are unfortunately not being held to EULAs, click through or otherwise. It throws away centuries of common law practice and jurisprudence in the interest of pandering to special interests (the packaged, mass-market software industry).
I don't get it... as far as I can see from his images, they didn't "embed" his content or hotlink it per se. What they did was open it in a new window (not hotlinking), but hide the URL bar so as to "obscure" (poorly) the fact that the content was on another site entirely. So was it misleading? Yes, somewhat. Was it hotlinking, in the usual sense? No.
Was it impolite and deceitful? Definitely, but not much more so than the response.
Your post is seriously misleading or pure hyperbole. Do you think you can back your claim up with some statistics on the expenses incurred by pharmaceutical companies?
I realize that marketing drugs is a major activity of big pharma, but your claim about where innovation goes on and where drug candidates are developed and how they are developed shows complete ignorance about the complexity of the process and the sorts of risks that companies assume in the process of taking thousands of drug candidates through to bring one or two viable drugs to market.
This is the dumbest allocation of taxpayer dollars I've ever heard of. They should just sell the things for market price (get somebody to eBay them for 250-300 bucks a pop) and put that money back into school coffers so that it benefits all the taxpayers.
Doing this (giving away several hundred dollar laptops for 50 bucks) benefits the 1000 people who happened to show up earliest on this particular day to this sale at the expense of every other taxpayer in the county. And, as you pointed out, the cost when you factor in added police hours, chaos, potential lawsuits from trampling victims, makes this more likely to cost the taxpayers more than was earned back anyway.
Completely imbecilic idea.
I hate to be a stickler for details, but neo-conservatives aren't anti-science, and are generally considered social moderates. It's the religious, social conservative masses that voted for Bush (his political base) that are anti-science.
The Bush regime uses these scientific issues to pander to their base, while they pull the wool over their eyes about how they are screwing up the economy and sending their children (i.e. the children of poor, rural Christian conservatives who make up a large portion of the armed services) to go do the dying in Iraq.
I agree, my metric is usually anything that I know needs more than about 10 seconds of somebody's attention should be sent by email. I'll IM somebody to point something quick out or ask a one off question, but for a detailed analysis or extensive comments, it's always going to be email. Long or thoughtful IMs just don't get read most of the time.
yeah and this one time, at band camp... oh never mind
That was the entire point of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to establish a clearer chain of accountability and hold a CEO and the Directors responsible. Contrary to what you may hear in the popular press, this accountability has always been there, and S-O just reinforces it. When we had an unfortunate incident with a very large check from a customer that bounced at my former company (I was a founder and an executive, but not the CEO and was no longer serving in a voting Board seat), I was threatened by our bank and told that I would be named in a lawsuit to collect the monies, and that all the executives and the board members would be held jointly and severally liable in the State of Massachusetts.
And this was for something that wasn't even any of our faults, but rather happened because a customer wrote a very large check that they knew was bad.
The issue is that sometimes as companies get particularly large, the question of who is responsible for what and who knows what becomes a bit more muddy, which is what S-O attempts to address. The solution is not to do away with the separation between labor and capital and remove the ability to use pooled resources, to sell equity and so on - basically completely destroy all the great tools that capitalism provides us to grow our economy. That would be incredibly foolish.
For the most part, the laws are on the books, it's just a matter of enforcing them properly, and tweaking some rules to make sure that there is always *somebody* to be held accountable if a company does bad things.
He had his youngest daughter in 2000, when he was 80 (!), with his wife Wende, whom he'd been married to since 1975. Way to go, James.
So I guess his Doohan was still working?
groan
The whole point of ethanol is that there are far better ways of producing fuel-use ethanol than corn fermentation, which has been debated for years in terms of its energy efficiency.
The enthusiasm for ethanol by real scientists is from the very promising means for producing ethanol from cellulose-based feedstocks, in other words from cheap plentiful surplus materials. While this wasn't cost-effective as an energy alternative when gas cost 80 cents a gallon, at 2.25-2.50 a gallon, cellulosic ethanol is quite competitive on a dollar-per-mile basis, and it can extract energy from cheap, easy to grow feedstocks or waste-cellulose material that would otherwise end up in municipal garbage dumps.