The clearest signal comes from BP - formerly "British Petroleum", new name "Beyond Petroleum"
Its interesting that (at least here in the UK) they are starting to advertise based on their environmental plans and using vox pops of people in the street talking about future energy. Oil and petrol doesn't really get a mention. Also of note is that many technologies, such as Hydrogen fuel cells, that people assume the Oil companies hate, have been patented and developed by the oil industry. They know they have to find something else.
Thanks for that, I did wonder at the time when I heard the narator say "neutralinos", but I honestly thought he meant "neutrinos".
Re:Does going public effect the level of trust?
on
Can We Trust Google?
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· Score: 1
Of course, the principle that a corporation has an obligation to increase its share value only applies to public companies. I am not in the US, but I do believe (and hopefully someone qualified can back me up here) that it is against US stock market rules (which may or may not be backed up by law), for the directors/execs at a public company to not act when they know that doing so would increase the profits of the corp (and therefore increase the stock price). Of course this does take into account that you might be playing the long game and things like R&D, & other things that increase the value of the company are ultimately (in the view of the directors) going to increase the companies profits/value or at least prevent it from falling.
I dont know of the UK parallel, but I am betting that there is one here too (and again I am hoping there is someone actually qualified who can confirm or set me straight.)
What was good about this one in particular was that the scientists actually seemed to be open minded and not clinging to their theories with an immature pride. Even the 'defenders' of dark matter were open and interested by the idea of modifying the laws of gravity.
What made me laugh is that one Professor has been in the bottom of the deepest mine in Europe for 16 years searching for neutrinos, and has found nothing.
Re:Does going public effect the level of trust?
on
Can We Trust Google?
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· Score: 1
Does "Don't be evil" take a back seat to making profits?
If you are a public company you have to make profits over everything else, in fact it is your only purpose.
IMHO Google are OK, but sooner or later they will have to give up the "Do no evil" mantra. Moving into China is a case in point, as a private company they could have walked away, they still would be making massive profits without China. However as a public company they are obliged to move in and comply with the government, for not doing so would be a criminal act (failing to act apon something they know will increase the profits/share price of the company). Its ironic that by going onto the stockmarket (going all out Capitalist), they were forced to aid Communism.
It all sounds a bit like Intel's hijacking a technical term and trying to turn it into a brand name.
It seems to be a standard marketing ploy these days, the Ford Ka springs to mind. I guess the benefit it gives the product, is a sort of consumer confusion. I might say to someone "you need a dual core chip", they would go to the shop and see "Core Duo" and think that must be what I was talking about, even though I mean simply the generic term for any chip with two cores. Its a bit like Hoover, only naming their product a "Hoover" after everyone has started using the term to mean any Vacumn cleaner, make your product seem like it was the first one.
Also, the license fee currently is per household/flat, not per head. Even those who are tax exempt (like students) have to pay the fee if there is a TV in the house.
If not, you're likely to be tracked not just by your employer but by anyone else with an RFID scanner.
Yep, so the company thinks it gets better security, but in fact it is actually compromising the security of its staff. Just go around the town with a reciever and you could quickly work out who works for this company and who has access to the datacenter. If this place does something so important that they think this bionic 'enhancement' is justified. Then they shouldn't be broadcasting their staff for everyone to find. Most espionage is simple, you find someone who works for company/government X and either bribe or blackmail them. This makes the former part a piece of piss.
Whatever happened to simple checks and balances, many employees auditing and accounting for many other employees. Or is this a way to justify layoffs for the auditing staff?
Small wonder why Grisoft has done very well with their excellent AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. The current Version 7.1.375 is fast, powerful and consumes little system resources. (big thumbs up)
That and it is free and works properly. I hate the fact that you would pay for Norton, then every year after you have to pay them for definition updates, and then pay even more if you want to get it to work properly. A couple of years ago,I was running NAV & firewall and I went on to their website to check my defences (naturally assuming that because I was using their software I would be fine) and found that I had several ports open. Nortons advice was "to get a firewall", as I was using theirs I was pretty angry. I am relatively IT literate, but could not get the firewall to fully protect me, going onto Norton's website was no help either, there didn't seem to be any instructions on how to close ports. And they wanted me to pay for support. I even tried to uninstall and re-install, but somehow it remembered all of its settings (so obviously wasn't unistalling completely). But I was stupid back then and forgot about it for a few weeks. Suddenly I found that I could hardly get on the net (broadband) and when I did I couldn't do anything. After a while, I had tried everything else, I turned off my firewall and found that the net worked fine, Norton was now protecting the Net from me. I installed Zonealarm, Ad-aware & AVG on the advice of a paranoid friend. And I was amazed that my PC actuallly ran much faster (and that was one of the benefits I wasn't aware of, so it wasn't simply auto-suggestion).
I just wish my work would get rid of McAfee (which I used before Norton and it was even worse), I hate the point at which suddenly without any warning, my PC hangs for a few minutes bacause the definitions are updating.
There seems to be two things that no one seems to have mentioned and that would be the biggest problems in the organisation I am in (which is currently upgrading everyone from NT to XP). 1. We have many applications for different parts of the business, each of those applications has been procured, with a support contract. Most of these applications are only supported for runnning on Windows XP. Imagine the cost of not only replcaing the OS (even with a free one) but renegotiating the providers' support contract along with installing the linux-ported software. In many cases the application used is critical and has no Linux equivalent, so new business processes would have to be created (which is a massive task). Having unsupported software wont work either as most large organisations have risk registers, disaster recovery plans etc and critical software that could break with no one to fix it would be too high up on any risk list to consider. Especially as the organisation I am in is the public sector and we are pretty much obliged to make sure that we are covered.
2. The other thing that would be massive to the cost of changeover for any business is training, not just retraining the support/IT staff to know which IP addresses to free up or anything technical, but the users many of whom are only IT literate enough to know how to do what they currently do, on the current software, changing to XP will cause them alot of trouble but not too much as most things are very much the same. And of course most people have Windows at home so familiarity is a large factor in training. Yes Linux may be easy to use and I would like it here, but I am IT literate and could learn to use a spreadsheet program that isn't Excel. Most people could not (at least fast enough for the business not to suffer).
I also saw that edition of Horizon (it aired only last Thursday http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon /orleans.shtml). And the claim of the 'forensic engineer' (or whatever he called himself) Professor Ivor Van Heerden was that while the Levees were rated to stand a category 3, they wouldn't have actually been able to withstand a direct category 1. The reasons given for this (if my memory serves me correctly) were - That the ground was soft clay, which the designers had not taken into account. The levees also were not dug as deep as the depth of the canal. So when the storm hit, the levees were undermined by the foundations soaking up water and were easily pushed over just before the peak of the surge.
That program also shared some other interesting points (which I will merely highlight here as the link is above) notably - That New Orleans has been sinking, this is due to the soft clay gradually drying out and compacting, as a result of the powers that be preventing the river from flooding every year. Also that the marshland between N.O. and the sea was a natural hurricane defence, but also because of the lack of flooding and human neglect, they are rapidly being lost. Both of the above are contributing to an increased chance that a Katrina/Rita disaster will repeat.
Not being a lawyer (and I dont know where you are either), I cant really dispute you. But I am sure it wont be long before it effectively isnt. After all isn't filesharing just a form of 'lending', kinda.
Sorry, but the RIAA haven't let 'fair use' get in the way of lawmaking or litigation. Just a quick look at the back of my 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' DVD and it says at the bottom, (which to the RIAA is as legally binding as any will signed in blood)
"Any unauthorised copying, editing, exhibition, renting, lending, public performance, diffusion and/or broadcast of this DVD, or any part thereof, is strictly prohibited"
After all if lending was legal then we could just 'lend' these to everyone.
I wonder how many RIAA members have lent a book to someone, after all dont books have the same copyright laws as any other media?
They are pretty bad, but I am not sure they are the worst Hollywood house to make single films into pointless sequel franchises, Police Academy 7 anyone? And I was shocked when I heard that this - http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0342108/combined even existed (I wasn't aware of the 3rd and 4th). The truth is that making sequels is one of the best ways for a studio to make money. You dont have to make a good film the second time round, people will watch it anyway because they enjoyed the first film. Art it is not, but the games industry is far worse for this.
And yet the Republicans claim that it was to free people from documented genocide. Is it fair to not accept that as their belief on the matter?
No. Because that wasn't the reason that they (or the UK Government) gave before the war. If memory serves me correctly, the justification was that it was part of the 'war on terror' and Iraq was linked to Al-Qaeda and it was threatening the world with a stockpile of powerful weapons that could strike in 45 minutes.http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/19/ sprj.irq.bush/ As none of the above actually had any truth and many of the documents provided were 'doctored' - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3466005.stm. Why should we believe them?
These people were suspected terrorists and will be given a fair trial eventually (I admit that making them wait years for it is very wrong)
All of them? Considering that three 'suspects' who were fortunate enough to have UK passports were not in any way linked - http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743 ,1169147,00.html How many others are innocent? How many are quilty? The US didn't round all of the detainees from a specific list (only the 'pack of cards'), most were simply rounded up for bribes (which for an Afgan would have been huge) http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0531-10.ht m . Are you saying that the local warlords, would have used proper policing methods, or just grabbed hold of anyone they didn't like and handed him over for a huge payout. And how long will they have to wait? How fair will the trial be? Can you really defend freedom by removing it?
Why single out Israel? You seem to have a hate brewing for that country for some reason.
No he doesn't. The Parent was pointing out the hypocrasy that a country that has violated UN resolutions for years, is 'allowed' nuclear weapons, but another isn't. Your attempting to knock down a well made critism by simply screaming "hate".
Yet republicans won the election with a majority.
You did get that one right. Like it or not, the prevaling view (at least from the voting public) is support for Bush. It may seem different when you talk with your friends (or for someone across the pond watch 'The Daily Show'), read/. or just hope. But thats the way it is.
what if Europe demanded to know the secret ingredients to certain food products
Europe does demand to know the secret ingredients to all food products sold, at least it is the case here in the UK (and I am pretty sure the rest of the EU). Everyone has a *right* to know all ingredients in the food products they purchase. If I someone a nut allergy, they would want to *know* that the food they are about to eat will not kill them. You cant get round that by saying that "they are secret ingredients", neither should Microsoft.
Google doesn't want to bother with freedom of speech, it just wants to sell a product.
No shit. It's almost as if Google has to sell its products in order make profits. You have to remember that Google is a publicly owned company and it has a responsibility to make bigger profits. The CEO and decision makers at Google would literally be criminals if they did not perform an action (moving into China) that they knew would increase the companies profits, morals are irrelevant to profit.
Perhaps this is why the borg analogy of Microsoft (and other bigs) seems so apt.
Actually if you had read the articles you posted you would realise that in fact BMW has NOT SOLD any hydrogen powered cars, the cars mentioned in the articles were just prototypes used to ferry people around at a show. They may have made big claims at the time about putting them into production, but six years later and still there is no hydrogen BMW for sale.
That is the most well made point about Intel's honesty on this 'story'. Intel gained a great deal of ground with the Pentium because they admitted fairly openly to the division bug (I forget what the popular name for the error was), it was massively embarassing for them as I recall. But it did build huge a trust in Intel. To see the benefits of consumer trust, you just have to ask why Intel's more expensive, outperformed CHIPS, outsold AMD's for years and remember that Intels big customers aren't the public but other large companies who always look for the cheapest parts they can get away with. Publishing known errors should IMHO be obligatory, be you selling hardware or software. The consumer has a right to know the limitations of any product they purchase, before they purchase.
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...after all, wont this help terrorists and paedophiles to evade the surveillance we have in our free nations?
Also of note is that many technologies, such as Hydrogen fuel cells, that people assume the Oil companies hate, have been patented and developed by the oil industry. They know they have to find something else.
Thanks for that, I did wonder at the time when I heard the narator say "neutralinos", but I honestly thought he meant "neutrinos".
Of course, the principle that a corporation has an obligation to increase its share value only applies to public companies.
I am not in the US, but I do believe (and hopefully someone qualified can back me up here) that it is against US stock market rules (which may or may not be backed up by law), for the directors/execs at a public company to not act when they know that doing so would increase the profits of the corp (and therefore increase the stock price).
Of course this does take into account that you might be playing the long game and things like R&D, & other things that increase the value of the company are ultimately (in the view of the directors) going to increase the companies profits/value or at least prevent it from falling.
I dont know of the UK parallel, but I am betting that there is one here too (and again I am hoping there is someone actually qualified who can confirm or set me straight.)
What great timing the bbc has, only last week Horizon aired a documentary on the search to find, or disprove the need for dark matter. A synopsis is here : - http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon /missing.shtml.
What was good about this one in particular was that the scientists actually seemed to be open minded and not clinging to their theories with an immature pride. Even the 'defenders' of dark matter were open and interested by the idea of modifying the laws of gravity.
What made me laugh is that one Professor has been in the bottom of the deepest mine in Europe for 16 years searching for neutrinos, and has found nothing.
If you are a public company you have to make profits over everything else, in fact it is your only purpose.
IMHO Google are OK, but sooner or later they will have to give up the "Do no evil" mantra.
Moving into China is a case in point, as a private company they could have walked away, they still would be making massive profits without China. However as a public company they are obliged to move in and comply with the government, for not doing so would be a criminal act (failing to act apon something they know will increase the profits/share price of the company). Its ironic that by going onto the stockmarket (going all out Capitalist), they were forced to aid Communism.
It seems to be a standard marketing ploy these days, the Ford Ka springs to mind.
I guess the benefit it gives the product, is a sort of consumer confusion. I might say to someone "you need a dual core chip", they would go to the shop and see "Core Duo" and think that must be what I was talking about, even though I mean simply the generic term for any chip with two cores.
Its a bit like Hoover, only naming their product a "Hoover" after everyone has started using the term to mean any Vacumn cleaner, make your product seem like it was the first one.
Also, the license fee currently is per household/flat, not per head. Even those who are tax exempt (like students) have to pay the fee if there is a TV in the house.
Yep, so the company thinks it gets better security, but in fact it is actually compromising the security of its staff.
Just go around the town with a reciever and you could quickly work out who works for this company and who has access to the datacenter. If this place does something so important that they think this bionic 'enhancement' is justified. Then they shouldn't be broadcasting their staff for everyone to find.
Most espionage is simple, you find someone who works for company/government X and either bribe or blackmail them. This makes the former part a piece of piss.
Whatever happened to simple checks and balances, many employees auditing and accounting for many other employees. Or is this a way to justify layoffs for the auditing staff?
That and it is free and works properly. I hate the fact that you would pay for Norton, then every year after you have to pay them for definition updates, and then pay even more if you want to get it to work properly.
A couple of years ago,I was running NAV & firewall and I went on to their website to check my defences (naturally assuming that because I was using their software I would be fine) and found that I had several ports open. Nortons advice was "to get a firewall", as I was using theirs I was pretty angry.
I am relatively IT literate, but could not get the firewall to fully protect me, going onto Norton's website was no help either, there didn't seem to be any instructions on how to close ports. And they wanted me to pay for support. I even tried to uninstall and re-install, but somehow it remembered all of its settings (so obviously wasn't unistalling completely).
But I was stupid back then and forgot about it for a few weeks. Suddenly I found that I could hardly get on the net (broadband) and when I did I couldn't do anything. After a while, I had tried everything else, I turned off my firewall and found that the net worked fine, Norton was now protecting the Net from me. I installed Zonealarm, Ad-aware & AVG on the advice of a paranoid friend. And I was amazed that my PC actuallly ran much faster (and that was one of the benefits I wasn't aware of, so it wasn't simply auto-suggestion).
I just wish my work would get rid of McAfee (which I used before Norton and it was even worse), I hate the point at which suddenly without any warning, my PC hangs for a few minutes bacause the definitions are updating.
There seems to be two things that no one seems to have mentioned and that would be the biggest problems in the organisation I am in (which is currently upgrading everyone from NT to XP).
1. We have many applications for different parts of the business, each of those applications has been procured, with a support contract. Most of these applications are only supported for runnning on Windows XP. Imagine the cost of not only replcaing the OS (even with a free one) but renegotiating the providers' support contract along with installing the linux-ported software. In many cases the application used is critical and has no Linux equivalent, so new business processes would have to be created (which is a massive task).
Having unsupported software wont work either as most large organisations have risk registers, disaster recovery plans etc and critical software that could break with no one to fix it would be too high up on any risk list to consider. Especially as the organisation I am in is the public sector and we are pretty much obliged to make sure that we are covered.
2. The other thing that would be massive to the cost of changeover for any business is training, not just retraining the support/IT staff to know which IP addresses to free up or anything technical, but the users many of whom are only IT literate enough to know how to do what they currently do, on the current software, changing to XP will cause them alot of trouble but not too much as most things are very much the same. And of course most people have Windows at home so familiarity is a large factor in training. Yes Linux may be easy to use and I would like it here, but I am IT literate and could learn to use a spreadsheet program that isn't Excel. Most people could not (at least fast enough for the business not to suffer).
I also saw that edition of Horizon (it aired only last Thursday http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon /orleans.shtml). And the claim of the 'forensic engineer' (or whatever he called himself) Professor Ivor Van Heerden was that while the Levees were rated to stand a category 3, they wouldn't have actually been able to withstand a direct category 1. The reasons given for this (if my memory serves me correctly) were -
That the ground was soft clay, which the designers had not taken into account.
The levees also were not dug as deep as the depth of the canal. So when the storm hit, the levees were undermined by the foundations soaking up water and were easily pushed over just before the peak of the surge.
That program also shared some other interesting points (which I will merely highlight here as the link is above) notably -
That New Orleans has been sinking, this is due to the soft clay gradually drying out and compacting, as a result of the powers that be preventing the river from flooding every year.
Also that the marshland between N.O. and the sea was a natural hurricane defence, but also because of the lack of flooding and human neglect, they are rapidly being lost.
Both of the above are contributing to an increased chance that a Katrina/Rita disaster will repeat.
Not being a lawyer (and I dont know where you are either), I cant really dispute you. But I am sure it wont be long before it effectively isnt. After all isn't filesharing just a form of 'lending', kinda.
I wonder how many RIAA members have lent a book to someone, after all dont books have the same copyright laws as any other media?
It must be the standard unit of measurement for weighing TV's
They are pretty bad, but I am not sure they are the worst Hollywood house to make single films into pointless sequel franchises, Police Academy 7 anyone? And I was shocked when I heard that this - http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0342108/combined even existed (I wasn't aware of the 3rd and 4th).
The truth is that making sequels is one of the best ways for a studio to make money. You dont have to make a good film the second time round, people will watch it anyway because they enjoyed the first film.
Art it is not, but the games industry is far worse for this.
Because that wasn't the reason that they (or the UK Government) gave before the war. If memory serves me correctly, the justification was that it was part of the 'war on terror' and Iraq was linked to Al-Qaeda and it was threatening the world with a stockpile of powerful weapons that could strike in 45 minutes.http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/19
As none of the above actually had any truth and many of the documents provided were 'doctored' - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3466005.st
All of them? Considering that three 'suspects' who were fortunate enough to have UK passports were not in any way linked - http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,1374
And how long will they have to wait? How fair will the trial be? Can you really defend freedom by removing it?
No he doesn't. The Parent was pointing out the hypocrasy that a country that has violated UN resolutions for years, is 'allowed' nuclear weapons, but another isn't.
Your attempting to knock down a well made critism by simply screaming "hate".
You did get that one right. Like it or not, the prevaling view (at least from the voting public) is support for Bush. It may seem different when you talk with your friends (or for someone across the pond watch 'The Daily Show'), read
And before the humourless point it out, I do know that was a typo. I just thought it was funny.
Thats better, isn't it.
Europe does demand to know the secret ingredients to all food products sold, at least it is the case here in the UK (and I am pretty sure the rest of the EU). Everyone has a *right* to know all ingredients in the food products they purchase. If I someone a nut allergy, they would want to *know* that the food they are about to eat will not kill them. You cant get round that by saying that "they are secret ingredients", neither should Microsoft.
You have to remember that Google is a publicly owned company and it has a responsibility to make bigger profits. The CEO and decision makers at Google would literally be criminals if they did not perform an action (moving into China) that they knew would increase the companies profits, morals are irrelevant to profit.
Perhaps this is why the borg analogy of Microsoft (and other bigs) seems so apt.
That is the most well made point about Intel's honesty on this 'story'.
Intel gained a great deal of ground with the Pentium because they admitted fairly openly to the division bug (I forget what the popular name for the error was), it was massively embarassing for them as I recall. But it did build huge a trust in Intel. To see the benefits of consumer trust, you just have to ask why Intel's more expensive, outperformed CHIPS, outsold AMD's for years and remember that Intels big customers aren't the public but other large companies who always look for the cheapest parts they can get away with.
Publishing known errors should IMHO be obligatory, be you selling hardware or software. The consumer has a right to know the limitations of any product they purchase, before they purchase.