S- and Limited Liability Corporations were created so that the "little guy" could get into business. That "liability shield" thing is so that if someone slips on your sidewalk, spills hot coffee, or uses a lawnmower they bought to trim hedges (real story!) they can sue for your business - but not for your house, car, or the contents of your refrigerator.
If we didn't have these small business constructs, nobody would be able to go into business without a fleet of lawers on retainer - especially in a society this litigious. I, for one, like the little guy - and these laws level the playing field with the likes of Microsoft and McDonalds who do retain a few dozen law firms.
Now, if you own an "S-corp LLC" but don't think it's "right", then you're one in the same as those "fascist corporatists" boogeymen everyone is bashing - anything for the sake of money, hmm?
I own an original model M - it came free with the IBM PS/1 and PS/2 machines I fished out of a dumpster. Trust me, they're not sustained-jet-engine-proximity loud. Not even idiot-with-iPod-and-earbuds loud.
You may laugh, but the clicking is the best part. It's caused by that whole "buckling spring" thing, which makes the keys extra responsive (the clicking noise is a side effect.) I can easily type 20-40 words per minute faster on my Das Keyboard II (not buckling spring, but similar design) and with better accuracy than on, say, the gummy $10 keyboards that came free with the lab computers. Ditto for my Model M - except that I miss the Windows key too much, so I only whip it out if I'm going to be typing a long paper or something.
I was going to rant about how that was not true about C, but I stopped myself. C went through a bunch of iterations (AT&T, K&R, others still way before my time) before it became an ANSI standard.
So, I guess the lesson is to use a language that has stopped evolving. I can write POSIX code on a Windows box (Vista + Visual Studio 2005) and compile it and execute it on both Windows and Solaris. (The labs I had to do involved forking, signals, semaphores, and sockets.) With very few exceptions (our Solaris box evidently supported a pause() command) I could compile the same client/server code on both OSes with correct behavior.
Is Python still evolving? Is Java still evolving? I guess the lesson here is to stay away from them. C (and C++ especially) have a lot of nice libraries; if you have to hack a single line of Python out in a 1000 lines of C, save those thousand lines of C in a proper library and #include next time.
Then again, I'm also a "tools for jobs" kind of guy - I'd much rather write the one-line Python program than the 1000 line C program. But then again, is saving 999 lines of code worth the chance of it breaking in Python 2.6?
Aww... Ragging on Windows 3.1 brought a little emo-tear to my eye. I grew up and learned computing on good ol' DOS/Windows 3.11. (The "-point-eleven for workgroups" part made all the difference, I'm told, as it didn't have the same memory leaks.)
Do you guys have any idea how amazing Windows 3.11 was? With a 386, you could run multiple DOS applications - at the same time! What did you have to do before that? My trusty Borland Turbo C (and Lotus apps too, I'm told) would helpfull start another command shell over the current one, and hope that whatever you did in the second shell didn't obliterate the first one.
Windows could overlap! That was spiffy. 3.11 was a far sight better for networking than DOS ever was, and I never had any problems with it crashing. (Of course, I mostly used Microsoft Word 6, if anything, in Windows. Most games I booted from specially-crafted DOS boot disks so I could get the memory management just right.)
But to say 3.11 was dismal? What did Gnome look like then? And what were they charging for Macs? (This is in 90s dollars, mind you.)
"Status quo?" I'm trying to figure out what you think that is.
So far I have:
Corporations in America can murder citizens because rich people are untouchable. (Citation: Indian industrial spill.)
All corporations do nothing but put money ahead of everything and everyone. (Tell me where you work so I can call you a hypocrite or a tool or whatever that makes you.)
Corporations in America can't murder citizens, but they can do everything else.
Take a deep breath and stop giving the green party money. We have some of the most onerous business regulation in the free world, especially where corporate transparency is concerned; Sarb-Ox is a great example of this. We generally have clean air and water, safe food, and effective medicine. 95% of people are employed, and 97% are not losing their house.
535 stupid yet democratically elected people hardly make a plutocracy. With a 4 digit UID, I expect less rabid discourse than from, say, a 6-digit UID.
Firstly, the Indian government owned 49%. This wasn't "greedy and stupid", this was just "stupid" and yet another reason why centralized economic planning is bad.
Besides the fact that an industrial disaster, however negliegent and stupid, isn't exactly murdering hitmen, there's a problem with your wikipedia entry:
The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.(April 2008)
This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (May 2008)
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008)
Now, I can't speak for INDIA, but in America, those who put "yourself and your possessions ahead of everything else in the whole world" would have gone to jail and the corporation fined.
That is, IF it wasn't stopped by the appropriate federal agency when the groundwater became toxic and livestock started dying. If it wasn't stopped by a civil suit FAILING action by said government agency.
Wait... Corporations can commit murder? Someone needs to stop playing Eve Online - the ninja-assassin-mob-hitman guy would be arrested for murder, and the evil capitalist plutocrat board members who hired him would be arrested as accomplices, for conspiracy, etc.
Now, corporations exist to make money. If a "slap on the wrist" for bad tech support is $bucks, it makes offshoring your phone banks less attractive. Much less.
Sounds like the system works. Unless you're one of those "intellectually bankrupt" fellows who think that anyone out making money in any amount for any reason must be greed-driven and, dare I say, evil.
Thing is, treaties in and of themselves mean nothing. Congress has to ratify them.
Sadly, we must all place our faith in the bribed, crack-addicted branch of our government to have some common sense. Or failing that, the judicial branch to nullify something so insane.
You may not trust the steam servers to be running in 25+ years, but the steam program lets you back up any and all of your games. You tell it which ones you want to back up, whether you're backing them up to CD, DVD, or a network share, and it will compress and burn them for you. When the steam servers die, boot up your steam client and restore the games. Run them in "offline mode."
If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you can always apply one of the many no-steam/no-CD cracks they have out there. Before steam, I would never have purchased a "digital download" copy of a game; I want my box and CD. But, steam saves me gas (or shipping), isn't run by some fly-by-night company, gives me the all-important instant gratification, and makes it ridiculously simple to back games up.
Other than your steam username and password, there's no DRM, either. Install the games on as many computers as you want, as many times as you want. (Of course, multiple users can't log into the same steam account at the same time.) No CD checking, no Starforce - I wouldn't buy Bioshock, for example, anywhere except on steam.
The only problem is that there's no secondary market - there's effectively no way for you to sell steam games you've purchased; somebody in another discussion on slashdot brought up the "right of first sale" problem. So, if you like selling used games back to Gamestop, then avoid steam.
But, all the games that I've had 25+ years ago (well, OK, 10-15) like Might and Magic III, IV, and V have all since decayed. Some of the floppies just plain wore out being boxed up on a shelf for so long; I had to pkzip the installed game onto a couple dozen floppies and move it off my 486 to get a "backup." Good thing I still had the manuals, too - finding manual passwords is an even more invasive form of DRM in my opinion, though MicroProse handled them better than most.
Most countries do a lot of things that are bad ideas. Our own country is one of them. "If France jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?"
But, to reiterate my other points, let's look info from the 2007 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
65% of workers earning minimum wage work part time. No matter how high the minimum wage is, you're not going to support yourself with part-time work.
Half of people earning minimum are under 25. These earners are largely comprised of people being supported by someone else (high school student living with parents, college students in parents' basement) who do not have families to support.
Food service provides the largest chunk of these minimum wage jobs. But, these jobs generally aren't "minimum wage" in that a lot of them are tipped positions.
22% are married. A minimum wage job is a secondary source of income.
I can't find my dead-tree source, but it had an older statistic on how many people are stuck earning minimum wage for more than 1 year (very few). The 2.3% of all workers who earn minimum wage are not the same people year after year.
Doing some quick math - 50% live with parents, 22% live with spouse. This is why minimum wage is a terrible way to "keep you from being homeless and starving" - at most this describes only 28% of minimum wage earners.
Minimum wage does not work. The overwhelming majority of people earning it are not impoverished. If the goal is to help prevent starvation, fixing the food stamps program would be a better use of our congresscritter's time.
Interesting tidbit: 3% of people without a high school diploma or GED earn minimum wage. 2% of people with a high school diploma earn minimum wage. 1% of people with a college diploma earn minimum. (I suspect these are English majors ^.^) If the college educated are three times less likely to earn minimum wage, maybe we could look at reforming our public education system and at further subsidization of student loans.
But, the point of my rant: Minimum wage does very little to help the impoverished. Better ways to fight poverty are improving education (which is harder than pulling a $number out of your arse!) and focus on programs that do help the poor.
Let's ignore the fact that minimum wages generally don't work as intended, that most people working minimum wage jobs are teenagers and secondary wage earners, and that significant increases in minimum wage also cause unemployment. (Figures are in a ~3 year old dead tree source, will dig it out when my library is put away.)
The problem is we have two conflicting ideas. One: That minimum wage should provide a "living wage" - otherwise, why have it? Two: That one should be able to make a living at minimum wage jobs.
Take the classical example: Flipping burgers at McDonalds. Unskilled, menial labor. Anyone willing to get literally and figuratively burned can do it. It adds little value to the finished product, other than "those burgers won't cook themselves." If McDonalds had to pay every 16 year old $30k with insurance, what do you think would happen to the dollar meal? McDonalds simply would not be able to stay in business until those burgers could cook themselves - we're looking at completely mechanizing the chains and having only one worker. Burgers are more expensive; there's more unemployment. Lose-lose.
This is a contrived example, but a minimum/living wage applies this nationally to everything we buy. For some jobs, it is simply not possible to justify hiring a person above a certain wage. Tweak the minimum wage to a "living" wage, and we see massive unemployment as those positions are terminated. Tweak it up a "little" so our congresscritters can feel warm and fuzzy, and you've laid off a few teenagers and generally accomplished nothing.
Point of my rambling: There are some jobs which will never, ever provide you (or a family!) with a decent standard of living. It has nothing to do with the minimum wage - if you assemble 50 widgets at a factory that each sell for a $.50 profit, do you think it is possible for them to pay you more than $25 an hour (and that if they ignore taxes, paying other salaries, maintaining equipment, buying new machines, and all other expenses)?
And, guess what happens to our contrived, fictional position of widget-maker if you set the minimum wage to $26 an hour? Economic realities are harsh - if you could legislate a standard of living, Congress could set the minimum wage at a billion dollars an hour and everyone would be happy.
Take the money you want sheltered. Spend all of it on buying stock and selling an equivalent amount short. If the stock plummets, write the purchase off on your taxes. If it soars, write the short off on your taxes.
Step 3: Profit. Anyone taking notes should question why we have such a screwed up tax system.
Yes, but the ethical detrius already controls society. They're going to eject you.
And, of course, the ethical detrius never believes that they are the ethical detrius. You could be the "real" ethical detrius. I could be the "ethical detrius."
No competitors? Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc? I can see that they not only have a monopoly in the browser market, but that they have also raked in oodles of cash from IE sales.~
Besides... Only in Microsoft's case would offering something cheaper and better in the otherwise oligopolistic AV market be "anticompetitive."
Considering the only market they've managed to "take over" is desktop and office software, I still wouldn't worry about it. Even then, the free alternatives are being increasingly used.
More competition is good. Period. Let's see another AV vendor, even if it's Microsoft.
Well, you'd think so. "Zomg Microsoft is creating security vulnerabilities and THEN selling security software conspiracy?!!" makes sense.
But, perfect (and secure) code is impossible in any codebase of a non-trivial size. (Windows' bloat qualifies as non-trivial.)
They've been giving out free security products, and have been slowly working their way up to better solutions. First came the free Malicious Software Removal Tool updates from windowsupdate, then came the also-free Windows Defender. Then they included Windows Defender as a part of Vista. Besides all the breakage they did in the name of security, they seem pretty hard set on fighting their "Windows is insecure" image.
As of yet, their only for-pay security product is Windows Live! One Care (tm). But, it is/was cheaper than other AV solutions; some threatened to sue because Microsoft was cheaper than something.
Now, Microsoft has always been kinda pokey at patching things. But, making security a "low priority" means they lose their business customers. The ones that spend $bucks for support contracts and a first crack at those security patches. They also have been doing everything indicative of making security a high priority.
An excellent point - material wealth and economic metrics are only a part of the human existence.
Why everyone assumes that "capitalism" as an economic system is an end-all description of everything, and then proceed to assume it's "evil" are beyond me.
You know, I would hope that an, ahem, *economic* system would put money (or, more accurately, wealth) ahead of whatever politically santizied soundbites catch people's ears nowadays.
You say we have laws to obstruct free markets, but in reality they help free markets. Besides the all-essential "enforcement of contracts" thing, there's also the fact that the paper company dumping PCBs in the river is going to fuck up the water company downstream. Little market externalities like that make things a little bit less "free."
You also seem to associate "profit" with "crushing." I'd be happy to keep you from crushing others. If you'd only send me your paychecks, I could save you from the profit of your labors.
Assuming you have a job and work for one of those evil capitalist profit-mongers. Hypocrite.
Either your definition of "supply" is screwed up, or else your definition of "physical good."
Providing service to 16 million players requires lots of servers, hefty storage and redundancy, and bandwidth. The supply is how many accounts worth of capacity they choose to support - every user takes up a variable amount of bandwidth, in addition to the sunk costs of software development (new content, bug fixes).
You think 100-odd realms just materialized out of thin air? This isn't some magic^H^H^H^H^H intellectual property idea here; each player ties up "scarce and limited", very physical resources. When WoW was first released, Blizzard credited a lot of people's accounts for server outages - they underestimated demand, which quickly outstripped supply.
Even assuming marginal costs are zero, that little "supply" line still enters the equation - either as "supply of capacity" or "supply of competing MMORPGs." If there was only World of Warcraft on the market, I'd bet they could definitely get away with charging $20 or even $30 monthly - heck, you can't get cable for that much. Now, consider that we have City of Heroes/Villains, Final Fantasy XII, or even Age of Conan...
Sigh. It's fine if it's not exactly your cup of thistle tea, but you don't have "no life" or "play it for several hours a day almost every single day" in order to enjoy World of Warcraft.
$13 a month isn't all that expensive of a hobby. For someone with a healthy BMI, that's, what, 3 fast food meals you gave up to afford your WoW fix? And, it's easy to quit, because they'll keep your account and characters around nigh indefinitely should you ever return. (Of course that makes it easy to return, too, but that's the point.)
Although WoW isn't exactly CounterStrike, it's more than just point and click - especially in Arena games, or any other kind of player versus player. You need some mastery of your class in order to be able to do well against other teams - you can't just right-click and wait for the player to die.
Blizzard's also been good about keeping down the cost/value ratio. New dungeons? Quest chains? Islands? Neutral cities? World events? What EverQuest or The Sims would release as an expansion, they release as a free patch to all subscribers. To date (the game's been around 4 years, hasn't it?), they've released one expansion pack - and that added 2 races, 10 levels, easily a dozen new dungeons, and a planet.
Now, what do you do with your spare time? Because I can guarantee you that that's a "waste of money," too.
Communism? I doubt anyone in their right minds would call Marx an "economist." Not a very good one, at any rate.
Libertarianism? School of political thought stressing individual freedom and responsibility.
The "current version of global capitalism"? Something that happened - this idea of selling stuff in other countries wasn't a political theory cooked up by Keynes or Milton or some dead white guy that got thrust upon the world.
Slashdot Mirror
S- and Limited Liability Corporations were created so that the "little guy" could get into business. That "liability shield" thing is so that if someone slips on your sidewalk, spills hot coffee, or uses a lawnmower they bought to trim hedges (real story!) they can sue for your business - but not for your house, car, or the contents of your refrigerator.
If we didn't have these small business constructs, nobody would be able to go into business without a fleet of lawers on retainer - especially in a society this litigious. I, for one, like the little guy - and these laws level the playing field with the likes of Microsoft and McDonalds who do retain a few dozen law firms.
Now, if you own an "S-corp LLC" but don't think it's "right", then you're one in the same as those "fascist corporatists" boogeymen everyone is bashing - anything for the sake of money, hmm?
I own an original model M - it came free with the IBM PS/1 and PS/2 machines I fished out of a dumpster. Trust me, they're not sustained-jet-engine-proximity loud. Not even idiot-with-iPod-and-earbuds loud.
You may laugh, but the clicking is the best part. It's caused by that whole "buckling spring" thing, which makes the keys extra responsive (the clicking noise is a side effect.) I can easily type 20-40 words per minute faster on my Das Keyboard II (not buckling spring, but similar design) and with better accuracy than on, say, the gummy $10 keyboards that came free with the lab computers. Ditto for my Model M - except that I miss the Windows key too much, so I only whip it out if I'm going to be typing a long paper or something.
Now, don't get me started on laptop keyboards...
I was going to rant about how that was not true about C, but I stopped myself. C went through a bunch of iterations (AT&T, K&R, others still way before my time) before it became an ANSI standard.
So, I guess the lesson is to use a language that has stopped evolving. I can write POSIX code on a Windows box (Vista + Visual Studio 2005) and compile it and execute it on both Windows and Solaris. (The labs I had to do involved forking, signals, semaphores, and sockets.) With very few exceptions (our Solaris box evidently supported a pause() command) I could compile the same client/server code on both OSes with correct behavior.
Is Python still evolving? Is Java still evolving? I guess the lesson here is to stay away from them. C (and C++ especially) have a lot of nice libraries; if you have to hack a single line of Python out in a 1000 lines of C, save those thousand lines of C in a proper library and #include next time.
Then again, I'm also a "tools for jobs" kind of guy - I'd much rather write the one-line Python program than the 1000 line C program. But then again, is saving 999 lines of code worth the chance of it breaking in Python 2.6?
Aww... Ragging on Windows 3.1 brought a little emo-tear to my eye. I grew up and learned computing on good ol' DOS/Windows 3.11. (The "-point-eleven for workgroups" part made all the difference, I'm told, as it didn't have the same memory leaks.)
Do you guys have any idea how amazing Windows 3.11 was? With a 386, you could run multiple DOS applications - at the same time! What did you have to do before that? My trusty Borland Turbo C (and Lotus apps too, I'm told) would helpfull start another command shell over the current one, and hope that whatever you did in the second shell didn't obliterate the first one.
Windows could overlap! That was spiffy. 3.11 was a far sight better for networking than DOS ever was, and I never had any problems with it crashing. (Of course, I mostly used Microsoft Word 6, if anything, in Windows. Most games I booted from specially-crafted DOS boot disks so I could get the memory management just right.)
But to say 3.11 was dismal? What did Gnome look like then? And what were they charging for Macs? (This is in 90s dollars, mind you.)
"Status quo?" I'm trying to figure out what you think that is.
So far I have:
Take a deep breath and stop giving the green party money. We have some of the most onerous business regulation in the free world, especially where corporate transparency is concerned; Sarb-Ox is a great example of this. We generally have clean air and water, safe food, and effective medicine. 95% of people are employed, and 97% are not losing their house.
535 stupid yet democratically elected people hardly make a plutocracy. With a 4 digit UID, I expect less rabid discourse than from, say, a 6-digit UID.
Firstly, the Indian government owned 49%. This wasn't "greedy and stupid", this was just "stupid" and yet another reason why centralized economic planning is bad.
Besides the fact that an industrial disaster, however negliegent and stupid, isn't exactly murdering hitmen, there's a problem with your wikipedia entry:
The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia.
Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.(April 2008)
This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.
Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (May 2008)
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008)
Now, I can't speak for INDIA, but in America, those who put "yourself and your possessions ahead of everything else in the whole world" would have gone to jail and the corporation fined.
That is, IF it wasn't stopped by the appropriate federal agency when the groundwater became toxic and livestock started dying. If it wasn't stopped by a civil suit FAILING action by said government agency.
Wait... Corporations can commit murder? Someone needs to stop playing Eve Online - the ninja-assassin-mob-hitman guy would be arrested for murder, and the evil capitalist plutocrat board members who hired him would be arrested as accomplices, for conspiracy, etc.
Now, corporations exist to make money. If a "slap on the wrist" for bad tech support is $bucks, it makes offshoring your phone banks less attractive. Much less.
Sounds like the system works. Unless you're one of those "intellectually bankrupt" fellows who think that anyone out making money in any amount for any reason must be greed-driven and, dare I say, evil.
Thing is, treaties in and of themselves mean nothing. Congress has to ratify them.
Sadly, we must all place our faith in the bribed, crack-addicted branch of our government to have some common sense. Or failing that, the judicial branch to nullify something so insane.
You may not trust the steam servers to be running in 25+ years, but the steam program lets you back up any and all of your games. You tell it which ones you want to back up, whether you're backing them up to CD, DVD, or a network share, and it will compress and burn them for you. When the steam servers die, boot up your steam client and restore the games. Run them in "offline mode."
If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you can always apply one of the many no-steam/no-CD cracks they have out there. Before steam, I would never have purchased a "digital download" copy of a game; I want my box and CD. But, steam saves me gas (or shipping), isn't run by some fly-by-night company, gives me the all-important instant gratification, and makes it ridiculously simple to back games up.
Other than your steam username and password, there's no DRM, either. Install the games on as many computers as you want, as many times as you want. (Of course, multiple users can't log into the same steam account at the same time.) No CD checking, no Starforce - I wouldn't buy Bioshock, for example, anywhere except on steam.
The only problem is that there's no secondary market - there's effectively no way for you to sell steam games you've purchased; somebody in another discussion on slashdot brought up the "right of first sale" problem. So, if you like selling used games back to Gamestop, then avoid steam.
But, all the games that I've had 25+ years ago (well, OK, 10-15) like Might and Magic III, IV, and V have all since decayed. Some of the floppies just plain wore out being boxed up on a shelf for so long; I had to pkzip the installed game onto a couple dozen floppies and move it off my 486 to get a "backup." Good thing I still had the manuals, too - finding manual passwords is an even more invasive form of DRM in my opinion, though MicroProse handled them better than most.
Most countries do a lot of things that are bad ideas. Our own country is one of them. "If France jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?"
But, to reiterate my other points, let's look info from the 2007 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
65% of workers earning minimum wage work part time. No matter how high the minimum wage is, you're not going to support yourself with part-time work.
Half of people earning minimum are under 25. These earners are largely comprised of people being supported by someone else (high school student living with parents, college students in parents' basement) who do not have families to support.
Food service provides the largest chunk of these minimum wage jobs. But, these jobs generally aren't "minimum wage" in that a lot of them are tipped positions.
22% are married. A minimum wage job is a secondary source of income.
I can't find my dead-tree source, but it had an older statistic on how many people are stuck earning minimum wage for more than 1 year (very few). The 2.3% of all workers who earn minimum wage are not the same people year after year.
Doing some quick math - 50% live with parents, 22% live with spouse. This is why minimum wage is a terrible way to "keep you from being homeless and starving" - at most this describes only 28% of minimum wage earners.
Minimum wage does not work. The overwhelming majority of people earning it are not impoverished. If the goal is to help prevent starvation, fixing the food stamps program would be a better use of our congresscritter's time.
Interesting tidbit: 3% of people without a high school diploma or GED earn minimum wage. 2% of people with a high school diploma earn minimum wage. 1% of people with a college diploma earn minimum. (I suspect these are English majors ^.^) If the college educated are three times less likely to earn minimum wage, maybe we could look at reforming our public education system and at further subsidization of student loans.
But, the point of my rant: Minimum wage does very little to help the impoverished. Better ways to fight poverty are improving education (which is harder than pulling a $number out of your arse!) and focus on programs that do help the poor.
Let's ignore the fact that minimum wages generally don't work as intended, that most people working minimum wage jobs are teenagers and secondary wage earners, and that significant increases in minimum wage also cause unemployment. (Figures are in a ~3 year old dead tree source, will dig it out when my library is put away.)
The problem is we have two conflicting ideas. One: That minimum wage should provide a "living wage" - otherwise, why have it? Two: That one should be able to make a living at minimum wage jobs.
Take the classical example: Flipping burgers at McDonalds. Unskilled, menial labor. Anyone willing to get literally and figuratively burned can do it. It adds little value to the finished product, other than "those burgers won't cook themselves." If McDonalds had to pay every 16 year old $30k with insurance, what do you think would happen to the dollar meal? McDonalds simply would not be able to stay in business until those burgers could cook themselves - we're looking at completely mechanizing the chains and having only one worker. Burgers are more expensive; there's more unemployment. Lose-lose.
This is a contrived example, but a minimum/living wage applies this nationally to everything we buy. For some jobs, it is simply not possible to justify hiring a person above a certain wage. Tweak the minimum wage to a "living" wage, and we see massive unemployment as those positions are terminated. Tweak it up a "little" so our congresscritters can feel warm and fuzzy, and you've laid off a few teenagers and generally accomplished nothing.
Point of my rambling: There are some jobs which will never, ever provide you (or a family!) with a decent standard of living. It has nothing to do with the minimum wage - if you assemble 50 widgets at a factory that each sell for a $.50 profit, do you think it is possible for them to pay you more than $25 an hour (and that if they ignore taxes, paying other salaries, maintaining equipment, buying new machines, and all other expenses)?
And, guess what happens to our contrived, fictional position of widget-maker if you set the minimum wage to $26 an hour? Economic realities are harsh - if you could legislate a standard of living, Congress could set the minimum wage at a billion dollars an hour and everyone would be happy.
I just buried my pets and loved ones in the Pet Semetary.
I gave them bad feedback; I was not happy with the result. Would not recommend.
That actually is (used to be?) a tax dodge.
Take the money you want sheltered. Spend all of it on buying stock and selling an equivalent amount short. If the stock plummets, write the purchase off on your taxes. If it soars, write the short off on your taxes.
Step 3: Profit. Anyone taking notes should question why we have such a screwed up tax system.
Yes, but the ethical detrius already controls society. They're going to eject you.
And, of course, the ethical detrius never believes that they are the ethical detrius. You could be the "real" ethical detrius. I could be the "ethical detrius."
(Who am I kidding; no I couldn't. ^.^
They were making a multiplayer version, but the IP stack overflowed?
No competitors? Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc? I can see that they not only have a monopoly in the browser market, but that they have also raked in oodles of cash from IE sales.~
Besides... Only in Microsoft's case would offering something cheaper and better in the otherwise oligopolistic AV market be "anticompetitive."
Considering the only market they've managed to "take over" is desktop and office software, I still wouldn't worry about it. Even then, the free alternatives are being increasingly used.
More competition is good. Period. Let's see another AV vendor, even if it's Microsoft.
Well, you'd think so. "Zomg Microsoft is creating security vulnerabilities and THEN selling security software conspiracy?!!" makes sense.
But, perfect (and secure) code is impossible in any codebase of a non-trivial size. (Windows' bloat qualifies as non-trivial.)
They've been giving out free security products, and have been slowly working their way up to better solutions. First came the free Malicious Software Removal Tool updates from windowsupdate, then came the also-free Windows Defender. Then they included Windows Defender as a part of Vista. Besides all the breakage they did in the name of security, they seem pretty hard set on fighting their "Windows is insecure" image.
As of yet, their only for-pay security product is Windows Live! One Care (tm). But, it is/was cheaper than other AV solutions; some threatened to sue because Microsoft was cheaper than something.
Now, Microsoft has always been kinda pokey at patching things. But, making security a "low priority" means they lose their business customers. The ones that spend $bucks for support contracts and a first crack at those security patches. They also have been doing everything indicative of making security a high priority.
I wouldn't worry about it.
you obviously never even bothered to research the issue (beyond hearing your high school English teacher get all pissy about the issue once)
Oh, the humanities?!
An excellent point - material wealth and economic metrics are only a part of the human existence.
Why everyone assumes that "capitalism" as an economic system is an end-all description of everything, and then proceed to assume it's "evil" are beyond me.
You know, I would hope that an, ahem, *economic* system would put money (or, more accurately, wealth) ahead of whatever politically santizied soundbites catch people's ears nowadays.
You say we have laws to obstruct free markets, but in reality they help free markets. Besides the all-essential "enforcement of contracts" thing, there's also the fact that the paper company dumping PCBs in the river is going to fuck up the water company downstream. Little market externalities like that make things a little bit less "free."
You also seem to associate "profit" with "crushing." I'd be happy to keep you from crushing others. If you'd only send me your paychecks, I could save you from the profit of your labors.
Assuming you have a job and work for one of those evil capitalist profit-mongers. Hypocrite.
Dupe. Old news. I remember un-redacting documents with CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS.
Big improvement over holding an empty disk platter over my opened hard disk and hoping the charges would transfer.
Either your definition of "supply" is screwed up, or else your definition of "physical good."
Providing service to 16 million players requires lots of servers, hefty storage and redundancy, and bandwidth. The supply is how many accounts worth of capacity they choose to support - every user takes up a variable amount of bandwidth, in addition to the sunk costs of software development (new content, bug fixes).
You think 100-odd realms just materialized out of thin air? This isn't some magic^H^H^H^H^H intellectual property idea here; each player ties up "scarce and limited", very physical resources. When WoW was first released, Blizzard credited a lot of people's accounts for server outages - they underestimated demand, which quickly outstripped supply.
Even assuming marginal costs are zero, that little "supply" line still enters the equation - either as "supply of capacity" or "supply of competing MMORPGs." If there was only World of Warcraft on the market, I'd bet they could definitely get away with charging $20 or even $30 monthly - heck, you can't get cable for that much. Now, consider that we have City of Heroes/Villains, Final Fantasy XII, or even Age of Conan...
Sigh. It's fine if it's not exactly your cup of thistle tea, but you don't have "no life" or "play it for several hours a day almost every single day" in order to enjoy World of Warcraft.
$13 a month isn't all that expensive of a hobby. For someone with a healthy BMI, that's, what, 3 fast food meals you gave up to afford your WoW fix? And, it's easy to quit, because they'll keep your account and characters around nigh indefinitely should you ever return. (Of course that makes it easy to return, too, but that's the point.)
Although WoW isn't exactly CounterStrike, it's more than just point and click - especially in Arena games, or any other kind of player versus player. You need some mastery of your class in order to be able to do well against other teams - you can't just right-click and wait for the player to die.
Blizzard's also been good about keeping down the cost/value ratio. New dungeons? Quest chains? Islands? Neutral cities? World events? What EverQuest or The Sims would release as an expansion, they release as a free patch to all subscribers. To date (the game's been around 4 years, hasn't it?), they've released one expansion pack - and that added 2 races, 10 levels, easily a dozen new dungeons, and a planet.
Now, what do you do with your spare time? Because I can guarantee you that that's a "waste of money," too.
Communism? I doubt anyone in their right minds would call Marx an "economist." Not a very good one, at any rate.
Libertarianism? School of political thought stressing individual freedom and responsibility.
The "current version of global capitalism"? Something that happened - this idea of selling stuff in other countries wasn't a political theory cooked up by Keynes or Milton or some dead white guy that got thrust upon the world.
Now if only Microsoft would include a good Chess game...
Actually, they did on Vista. *ducks*