Activists protested Wednesday outside Caterpillar Inc.'s annual shareholders meeting in Chicago, but lost their bid to get the Peoria corporation to study the use of its equipment in razing Palestinian homes overseas.
Stock owners defeated a proposal to determine whether the sale of bulldozers and other machinery to the Israel Defense Forces is consistent with Caterpillar's global code of business conduct. The Fortune 100 company's board opposed the measure.
Caterpillar's new chairman and CEO, Jim Owens, repeated the company's position that it feels compassion for displaced families but can't police the use of its more than 2 million pieces of equipment worldwide.
"After they've been sold, the owners of those machines determine how they're used," Owens told an audience of about 50 at the Northern Trust Building in Chicago's Loop. Some of the activists got inside the meeting because they or groups they represent own Caterpillar stock. Five of them spoke to board members before tentative voting results were announced; the measure earned support from about 4 percent of shareholders, which would allow it to be reintroduced next year.
Liat Weingart, co-director of San Francisco-based Jewish Voice for Peace, said more than 50,000 people have lost their homes in demolitions that often have no relation to Israeli security. Some Palestinians have been buried alive, she said.
Caterpillar is headquarted in Peoria, which is why the Peoria newspaper ran the story. I've been unable to locate any other newspaper running this story.
The Peoria newspaper portrays it as a loss for the activists, when in fact it is a major victory (the 4% means it has to be discussed at next year's shareholder meeting) and represents a creative and practical means for effecting change in corporate behavior -- much more practical than street riots.
As I've often stated, corporations should not be so large, last so long, and have Constitutional rights. However, if they have to be around, then the proposal contained in the conclusion of the seminal Small Is Beautiful for bridling corporations is good. Small is Beautiful says that since corporations are like mini-governments, run them as a democracy where all the stakeholders (all who are affected by the existence of the corporation, including investors but especially those who live near the corporation's activities) vote.
Failing those two -- i.e. if we can't ban large corporations and if we can't have stakeholders vote on how large corporations should be run -- then participating in the existing corporate governance process -- namely buying stock and voting at shareholders meetings -- is the next best thing.
This peaceful, legal alternative to reining in amoral powerful corporations has gone underreported.
I, and a bunch of others on CompuServe's CEFORUM, were putting off buying new TVs because HDTV was "just around the corner." 16 years later, evidently, it still is. 10 of those years were the broadcast standard wars, which was silly, because, overpaid steroid-pumped entertainers aside, the real value of HDTV was prerecorded movies, not over-the-air broadcasts. I.e. the important standard was HDMI, not what they were dickering over in the early 90's.
The other 6 of those years was, in my personal theory, due to DVD. DVD came out at just the wrong time (from the consumer's perspective). DVD purchasers in the late 90's thought they were getting HDTV. The manufacturers, I believe, let this myth continue and held off on HDTV-DVD so that all the consumers could finish buying all their movies in DVD, before they learned the bad news that they would have to buy them all over again in HDTV-DVD.
The only technology that is more laggard than home entertainment is space exploration.
In one presentation last year at Tulane University, a Lockheed Martin external tank researcher wrote that a change in the foam formula led to "unanticipated program impacts, such as foam loss during flight." The change was prompted by environmental concerns over using freon to spray on the foam.
[...] Hundreds of the heat-resistant tiles were damaged during a Columbia flight in 1997 when chunks of the foam broke off and hit the spacecraft. Some of the gouges were 15 inches long.
During that event and in the incident from October that Dittemore cited Monday, the foam came loose from a ridged part where the tank's liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen sections are joined together.
Technicians traced at least part of the problem to a chemical called HCFC 141b, which Lockheed Martin began using in the mid-1990s as a replacement for the freon gas used to help spray on the foam.
The new chemical may have contributed to "popcorning," which happens when the tiny cells within the tank's foam start to expand and break loose from the rest of the material.
The cells expand as the outside pressure decreases during the shuttle's ascent and the temperature rises from air friction and hot exhaust gases. The chemicals in the foam may also vaporize, increasing the pressure.
I don't understand why no one makes an affordable walltop off the shelf. I looked, and the only things I could find were $4000 kiosks.
Remember the media center room from the Buck Rogers TV show? That stuff is possible now. With today's hard drives, one can store not only hundreds of CD rips, but a few movie rips as well.
I realize I may be in the Slashdot minority when I suggest that TVs should not be in the main-level living room, but I've been looking for something that takes zero floor space for equipment and media, and a wallmount with WiFi to a storage server is just what I want to allow me or any of my guests to pull up any song, music video, or any video short for parties, mood music, etc.
Buck Rogers technology was possible 2-3 years ago, and it's still not available at Best Buy.
Fans who meticulously studied the release trailer may have noticed two shots nowhere to be found in the finished film. One is of a determined hooded Anakin marching down the Trade Federation cruiser hallway, and the other is of Ki-Adi-Mundi reluctantly turning to face some unseen fate while in the Jedi gunship hangar.
These shots were never intended for the final film but were needed to help fill out the story told in the trailer. The Anakin shot had been cut -- it was from the Jedi Temple attack. If you look at the animatics version of the shot (Hyperspace members, click here to see it), you can get an idea of what the shot was originally meant to represent. The footage was deemed trailer appropriate, so ILM composited the greenscreen footage of Anakin against a background plate of the cruiser hallway.
Intentionally putting stuff that "fills out the story" into only trailers? I don't know what I find more irritating, that they did this (and are now charging for it on the Internet), or that I no longer have the time to follow the Star Wars Universe in such detail.
The definition of "science" that the anti-evolutionists are advancing is really what Aristotle called metaphysics, which he treated separately from but compatibly with physics proper. This would be covered in the best of the best Catholic schools (those steeped in Thomism).
But if evangelicals want their children to be confused, they should have that choice in education. Catholics should have their choice. And government-loving atheists should have their choice to be fed the propaganda from government-run schools.
Under the current setup, there is an unjust wealth transfer by means of taxes from private school families and homeschool families to government-school families. One-size-fits-all is absurd yet the anti-evolutionists have embraced this absurd notion and turned it into a "battleground."
Have you ever done a survey of books at a public library? At least in my public library system, which is considered among the finest in the U.S., no books are carried that are overly critical of government, of unpopular (but perhaps important) political view, or simply not what a simple majority holds. For example, the library has several Protestant Bibles but no Catholic Bibles. Of the several books on school choice, all were against except for one that was neutral -- none in favor. Public libraries serve the government.
Public libraries, public schools, and public universities should all be shut down.
Charities should fund these services for those who cannot afford them themselves. The free market will weed out inefficient charities. There is no choice with a monolithic government. We can casr a vote for chief (assuming the vote is not lost in the black box of voting), but cannot vote with our wallets on a daily basis on individual products and services. Instead, the government removes the money from our wallets at the point of a gun.
Letting the government control the Internet is letting it control the press.
Besides, Wi-Fi is old technology (in terms of providing wireless-anywhere service, as opposed to providing wireless-in-your-own-building service), to be replaced by EVDO.
The A380 makes for nice bragging rights, and also for a nice cargo plane, but smaller, longer range planes like the new 777-200LR "long range" allow fewer stops and, almost as importantly for business travelers (or anyone needing to be somewhere at a particular time), more flexibility in departure/arrival times due to there being more flights.
Cargo doesn't care about such things, which is why FedEx was one of the first A380 customers. Japan, if it weren't so loyal to Boeing, might have used an all-economy class A380 to replace their inter-city "bus" known as the 747-400D ("Domestic").
The best thing about the A380 is that it'll make for great subject matter for Hollywood. But for actual traveling, the choice will be between fewer stops and more scheduling flexibility vs. a bigger plane.
Investigate the officers? My free-market libertarian mind says this is an opportunity for the New York Police Department to formalize a way for victims of less serious crimes to pay the department (as opposed to individual officers) for prioritization.
I've been the victim of financial crimes twice in the past two years. Both times, law enforcement wouldn't give me the time of day. Both times, I had a desire to know who was behind the crime and how it was done so that I could avoid being a victim in the future. I would have paid for that information. One time, I did -- I hired a private investigator. But the private investigator couldn't get to all the information a law enforcement officer could. And, of course, there was no justice served.
(Side note on copyrights: I support the notion of copyrights for a "limited time" (as proscribed by the U.S. Constitution) -- such as the 14+14 years of the Copyright Act of 1790. Presumably, pirated DVDs would have fallen under the Copyright Act of 1790, and so I support the prosecution of the DVD pirates. I even support the MPAA paying for the law enforcement. I don't support the individual officers pocketing the MPAA money -- it should have gone into the treasury to reduce taxes.)
Your CD-ROM was not rewritable or even recordable. Recall the NeXT's rewritable drive was just 256MB. But even assuming that Sony's 600MB magento-optical happened to be available at the time of your 500MB Grollier experience, you're quibbling over 20%?
See, the problem with optical is that because it is removeable media, the format is stuck in time. First, there is the vaporware period where an optical drive is announced. Favorable comparisons are made to hard drives available during the vaporware period. Then the optical drives are actually released, and the capacity is about the same as hard drives of the day -- but, hey, it's removeable (thus the niche applications I referred to). Then the optical drives can't incrementally upgrade capacity (manufacturers wait until a full doubling of capacity before making their customers upgrade), and the optical drives lag in capacity.
Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?
I hadn't heard of those projects and I seriously wonder if Microsoft has either.
As oft reported in the press, Microsoft's biggest competitor is old versions of its own software. The competition to XP Thin is Windows 98 sold on eBay.
Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities and have always had, of course, much slower access times. This relegates optical to niche applications that absolutely need the removeability aspect for storage for either archival (especially of space-hungry data such as lossless imaging) or security purposes. Examples include periodic ultrasound imaging of nuclear reactor components and, of course, medical applications. This announcement just continues the trend.
But for a given location, such as a rest stop, it's my understanding that there can be only one WiFi provider -- the dreaded "natural monopoly" of the wired era. As I've long said, WiFi is like the 56k modem of 1997. People didn't even know what DSL was back then, except for the select few who had the service available to them. Everyone was going hog-wild over 56k modems. Just like today, everyone is going wild over WiFi instead of EVDO, which is based on cell phone technology and thus allows competition.
When websites give me the choice of whether to selectively block ads from True.com -- which might as well have been from Abercrombie & Fitch -- or other sexually suggestive/immodest ads, then I'll drop the sledgehammer universal ad blocker.
The Slashdot story title is misleading -- it's not about broadband, but rather wireless broadband. The whole point of wireless is competition -- DirecTV and Dish started up as competition to cable precisely because they were wireless. Wireless breaks the hallowed "natural monopoly" of yore.
Let the wireless companies compete. And not just on WiFi. Verizon has EVDO, and Sprint is starting up their EVDO. Don't take tax money and give it to an inefficient -- and potentially tyrannical (in terms of ready cooperation with snooping federal agencies) -- government-run communications operation.
Any goal of bridging the "digital divide" for the economically disadvantaged should be handled by private charities. The last thing we need is for that segment of the population to have a government-run ISP censor blogs like whatreallyhappened.com (which was classified at one point by a censorware company as being "anti-Semitic", and thus presumably unavailable at some public schools and libraries).
New expenditures should be evaluated on their own merits.
Nice passive voice. Who would be doing the evaluation? Democracy? But the people who paid the "hundreds of millions" with their taxes are likely underrepresented in today's democracy. Justice demands that that subset of the population be given the opporunity to influence the decision on whether future benefits of the program justify additional expenses.
In that sense, past expenses are relevant, as they determine who should be influencing the evaluation.
In response to a casual user of the Internet who asked me what FTP is, I ranted off the response below. You can send it to your non-tech friends and family who may not be aware of what the Internet was meant for.
File Transfer Protocol -- the original "P2P" file sharing from the 1980's.
As the Internet was used mainly by the military and by universities back then, it was used to allow researchers to share published papers, research data, and software they had written.
That's why MGM v. Grokster is so bogus. P2P file sharing was one of the main purposes of the Internet (it wasn't to surf cnn.com).
Which brings me to another pet peeve. I keep seeing news reports on various topics that say things like "Internet and e-mail access". What they really meant to say was "web and e-mail". HTTP is but one of many protocols that run on the Internet. "The Internet" is much bigger than just "the web".
To make that even more clear, prior to the web, when you signed up to the Internet, you would expect "e-mail and UseNet". Now you expect "e-mail and web and maybe UseNet if the ISP is a) nice and b) retro".
It just illustrates that Internet protocols come and go. FTP was a file sharing protocol. Grokster, Kazaa, etc. are just new file sharing protocols.
UseNet itself is actually also based on peer-to-peer technology. UseNet is the globally distributed message board system.
groups.google.com archives UseNet posts, but they are just one of thousands of UseNet servers across the globe collaborating to provide the service. UseNet servers talk to each other as "peers" to synchronize their message postings.
The whole nature of the Internet was originally "peer-to-peer". But two things have come along to keep that concept out of the minds of most Internet users:
a) Web technology, which is more client-server than peer-to-peer. The popularity of the HTTP protocol has made it seem to most people that the web is the Internet, and thus most people think that to participate on the Internet means you are supposed to "log in" to some "official" computer (e.g. browsing to cnn.com)
b) Dynamic IP. The inventors of the Internet thought that 2 billion IP addresses was enough for the world. Well, we've run out, and so now when you get an Internet account you no longer get your own "static" IP address. Instead, you get a "dynamic" IP address. That makes it impossible to register a domain name (like underreported.com) to your own computer at home. Instead, you have to pay a "hosting provider" to use their computer running on their network that happens to be privileged enough to have static IP addresses. In the old days, everyone's computer handled their own e-mail, their own FTP server,
etc. FTP is really only effective with static IP addresses. The rise in popularity of so-called "P2P file-sharing apps" is due in part that
they were built to work with dynamic IP addresses (because they advertise themselves on a custom protocol as opposed to relying on the DNS (Domain Name System, where names like underreported.com are recorded along with their static IP addresses)).
I loathe every April 1 because I know I will lose my fix of "stuff that matters". I look to CNet as a backup. But now even they've been corrupted. Invasion of the content snatchers.
Now that the Fairfax County Supervisor candidates are announced, if I provide an opinion on my blog that is negative or positive about what an incumbant Supervisor has done, would that require me to file a disclosure report pursuant to 24.2-910?
I received the following response:
If the total aggregate of the independent expenditure is in excess of $200 and the expenditure is made to influence the outcome of an election for public office and if any material is published to the public referring to a candidate by name, description, or other reference, advocating the election or defeat, setting forth his position on any public issue, voting record, or other official acts, or otherwise designed to influence individuals to cast their votes for or against a candidate.
You must file a Statement of Organization and disclose the independent expenditure on a contributions and expenditures disclosure report.
The "Paid for by" and "Authorized by or Not Authorized by" Statements would apply as well.
Rise' Miller State Board of Elections Campaign Finance Division
Slashdot Mirror
For some marginally good news for a change, as highlighted by jewishvoiceforpeace.org and corpwatch.org, according to an Apr. 15, 2004 Peoria Journal Star article:
Caterpillar is headquarted in Peoria, which is why the Peoria newspaper ran the story. I've been unable to locate any other newspaper running this story.
The Peoria newspaper portrays it as a loss for the activists, when in fact it is a major victory (the 4% means it has to be discussed at next year's shareholder meeting) and represents a creative and practical means for effecting change in corporate behavior -- much more practical than street riots.
As I've often stated, corporations should not be so large, last so long, and have Constitutional rights. However, if they have to be around, then the proposal contained in the conclusion of the seminal Small Is Beautiful for bridling corporations is good. Small is Beautiful says that since corporations are like mini-governments, run them as a democracy where all the stakeholders (all who are affected by the existence of the corporation, including investors but especially those who live near the corporation's activities) vote.
Failing those two -- i.e. if we can't ban large corporations and if we can't have stakeholders vote on how large corporations should be run -- then participating in the existing corporate governance process -- namely buying stock and voting at shareholders meetings -- is the next best thing.
This peaceful, legal alternative to reining in amoral powerful corporations has gone underreported.
See also the previous UnderReported.com stories:
The other 6 of those years was, in my personal theory, due to DVD. DVD came out at just the wrong time (from the consumer's perspective). DVD purchasers in the late 90's thought they were getting HDTV. The manufacturers, I believe, let this myth continue and held off on HDTV-DVD so that all the consumers could finish buying all their movies in DVD, before they learned the bad news that they would have to buy them all over again in HDTV-DVD.
The only technology that is more laggard than home entertainment is space exploration.
Remember the media center room from the Buck Rogers TV show? That stuff is possible now. With today's hard drives, one can store not only hundreds of CD rips, but a few movie rips as well.
I realize I may be in the Slashdot minority when I suggest that TVs should not be in the main-level living room, but I've been looking for something that takes zero floor space for equipment and media, and a wallmount with WiFi to a storage server is just what I want to allow me or any of my guests to pull up any song, music video, or any video short for parties, mood music, etc.
Buck Rogers technology was possible 2-3 years ago, and it's still not available at Best Buy.
Slashdot itself ran the story Private .US Registrations Disallowed by NTIA
Separation of School & State
The definition of "science" that the anti-evolutionists are advancing is really what Aristotle called metaphysics, which he treated separately from but compatibly with physics proper. This would be covered in the best of the best Catholic schools (those steeped in Thomism).
But if evangelicals want their children to be confused, they should have that choice in education. Catholics should have their choice. And government-loving atheists should have their choice to be fed the propaganda from government-run schools.
Under the current setup, there is an unjust wealth transfer by means of taxes from private school families and homeschool families to government-school families. One-size-fits-all is absurd yet the anti-evolutionists have embraced this absurd notion and turned it into a "battleground."
Eliminate the battleground.
Public libraries, public schools, and public universities should all be shut down.
Separation of School & State
Charities should fund these services for those who cannot afford them themselves. The free market will weed out inefficient charities. There is no choice with a monolithic government. We can casr a vote for chief (assuming the vote is not lost in the black box of voting), but cannot vote with our wallets on a daily basis on individual products and services. Instead, the government removes the money from our wallets at the point of a gun.
Besides, Wi-Fi is old technology (in terms of providing wireless-anywhere service, as opposed to providing wireless-in-your-own-building service), to be replaced by EVDO.
Cargo doesn't care about such things, which is why FedEx was one of the first A380 customers. Japan, if it weren't so loyal to Boeing, might have used an all-economy class A380 to replace their inter-city "bus" known as the 747-400D ("Domestic").
The best thing about the A380 is that it'll make for great subject matter for Hollywood. But for actual traveling, the choice will be between fewer stops and more scheduling flexibility vs. a bigger plane.
The U.S. Executive Branch: dominion over all
I've been the victim of financial crimes twice in the past two years. Both times, law enforcement wouldn't give me the time of day. Both times, I had a desire to know who was behind the crime and how it was done so that I could avoid being a victim in the future. I would have paid for that information. One time, I did -- I hired a private investigator. But the private investigator couldn't get to all the information a law enforcement officer could. And, of course, there was no justice served.
(Side note on copyrights: I support the notion of copyrights for a "limited time" (as proscribed by the U.S. Constitution) -- such as the 14+14 years of the Copyright Act of 1790. Presumably, pirated DVDs would have fallen under the Copyright Act of 1790, and so I support the prosecution of the DVD pirates. I even support the MPAA paying for the law enforcement. I don't support the individual officers pocketing the MPAA money -- it should have gone into the treasury to reduce taxes.)
See, the problem with optical is that because it is removeable media, the format is stuck in time. First, there is the vaporware period where an optical drive is announced. Favorable comparisons are made to hard drives available during the vaporware period. Then the optical drives are actually released, and the capacity is about the same as hard drives of the day -- but, hey, it's removeable (thus the niche applications I referred to). Then the optical drives can't incrementally upgrade capacity (manufacturers wait until a full doubling of capacity before making their customers upgrade), and the optical drives lag in capacity.
As oft reported in the press, Microsoft's biggest competitor is old versions of its own software. The competition to XP Thin is Windows 98 sold on eBay.
Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities and have always had, of course, much slower access times. This relegates optical to niche applications that absolutely need the removeability aspect for storage for either archival (especially of space-hungry data such as lossless imaging) or security purposes. Examples include periodic ultrasound imaging of nuclear reactor components and, of course, medical applications. This announcement just continues the trend.
Why a 40% tax for piracy on something that can't be pirated?
But for a given location, such as a rest stop, it's my understanding that there can be only one WiFi provider -- the dreaded "natural monopoly" of the wired era. As I've long said, WiFi is like the 56k modem of 1997. People didn't even know what DSL was back then, except for the select few who had the service available to them. Everyone was going hog-wild over 56k modems. Just like today, everyone is going wild over WiFi instead of EVDO, which is based on cell phone technology and thus allows competition.
When websites give me the choice of whether to selectively block ads from True.com -- which might as well have been from Abercrombie & Fitch -- or other sexually suggestive/immodest ads, then I'll drop the sledgehammer universal ad blocker.
Let the wireless companies compete. And not just on WiFi. Verizon has EVDO, and Sprint is starting up their EVDO. Don't take tax money and give it to an inefficient -- and potentially tyrannical (in terms of ready cooperation with snooping federal agencies) -- government-run communications operation.
Any goal of bridging the "digital divide" for the economically disadvantaged should be handled by private charities. The last thing we need is for that segment of the population to have a government-run ISP censor blogs like whatreallyhappened.com (which was classified at one point by a censorware company as being "anti-Semitic", and thus presumably unavailable at some public schools and libraries).
In that sense, past expenses are relevant, as they determine who should be influencing the evaluation.
I discovered this issue 18 months ago.
Virginia blogs barred from mentioning local candidates
I loathe every April 1 because I know I will lose my fix of "stuff that matters". I look to CNet as a backup. But now even they've been corrupted. Invasion of the content snatchers.
Muppet Babies