But corporations do exist without any need for government. I can think of one that has been around for a very long time, is very well managed and highly profitable. Millions of dollars worth of goods and services move through this organization every year, and many of the consumers of the products would not have access to these products without this organization. The Mafia.
And only an idiot with no concept of gravity would shot his weapon 90 degrees straight up into the air. Sure it won't kill, but just dropping a bullet on your head from a third floor window would leave a nasty bump.
Reminds me of protests against the local police force for racism, profiling, etc. then demanding police protection when a bunch of rednecks come around to rough them up.
Actually, I do. Communism would have worked fine were it not for Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Po Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, etc. But Hu Jintao seems to have finally got it right. Oh, wait, he's a Capitalist. Never mind.
Not limited to Catholics. The best you can do is "filthy rags" for such a holy and untouchable God. So...why bother? There's people here and now that have much more appreciation for the good you can do for them.
IANAL, but that depends on "how" the company folds and to whom the information is disclosed to. If the board of directors of Company A want to dissolve the corporation, they cannot sell or give away the information without violating the agreement. They can choose to sell the corporation to Company B, but as the new owner, Company B now has ownership not only of Company A's assets, but also their liabilities (in this case, the non-disclosure agreement). So if Company B sells or gives away the information then they will be violating the agreement.
Bankruptcy changes up the game, and probably why B&N decided to wait for Borders to go into bankruptcy rather than buy them out. Bankruptcy wipes out many liabilities, including debts, contracts, even prepaid orders and gift certificates. So if Company A is driven into insolvency by poor management or bad luck, all of the agreements and contracts can simply disappear. The assets that remain are typically sold at auction by the bankruptcy trustee who's job it is to collect and preserve any remaining assets and distribute the proceeds of the auction to the creditors. The information gathered from customers is an asset of Company A that can be auctioned off.
So, if I really wanted to protect the information I shared with another entity (human or corporation), then I would make sure that the NDA included a bankruptcy clause, such as
"...Further, the obligation not to disclose shall not be affected by bankruptcy, receivership, assignment, attachment or seizure procedures, whether initiated by or against Recipient, nor by the rejection of any agreement between Owner and Recipient, by a trustee of Recipient in bankruptcy, or by the Recipient as a debtor-in-possession or the equivalent of any of the foregoing under local law..."
Even better would be an agreement to destroy records after a certain period of time, unless the records had to be retained to comply with specific government regulations. If I really cared about keeping the information private then I would consult a competent attorney to draft the NDA.
I don't mind if a company or organization wants to help low income families, but what about families like mine? I earn a relatively high income (like most techies who read Slashdot), but I am on the verge of bankruptcy. I have never spent money frivolously - in fact I've been accused of being too frugal. I made the unforgivable mistake of getting married while I was in college. Years into the marriage my wife started using meth and stopped taking care of my kids. Today I am raising my kids on my own, and my kids have "special needs", including mental health (very severe, to the point of being hospitalized twice for more than 10 days). For those unfamiliar with "the system" if the doc says they need to be committed you can't pull them out. The doc will just get a court order to keep them committed. So there's little point in fighting. But the bill still goes to you (list price $2,000.00 per day). My insurance company is still enjoying a beautiful loophole that keeps them from having to pay. So I'm stuck with all the medical expenses. Plus I'm a single dad. Mom has 2 supervised visits each month, but she has no job and pays no child support. Then there's car repairs, home repairs, extra school fees to attend the "free" public school, daycare expenses, thousands in legal bills to divorce the bitch, followed by thousands more the protect my kids from her convicted sex-offender boyfriend. Public transportation isn't a viable option where I live, and I am bound by court order to reside in the same county where she (the ex) lives - which is where her family is from but I need to drive 3.5 hours to visit my family. Taking care of an special needs child on your own doesn't leave much time for career development, advanced education, or even a second job. My options are limited to cutting spending or go bankrupt. I qualify, due to means testing, for chapter 7 bankruptcy, but bankruptcy popping up on my background report could disqualify me as a job candidate, especially for jobs that require a security clearance. I have cut out all personal luxuries, including cable TV, movies, eating out, computer hardware, software, books, activities, etc. My kids have no extra-curricular opportunities, but I doubt I could afford the gas if they did. If I keep living this way I might have my debts paid off in about five years. And then I'm going to continue living this way to save for my other child's college and my "retirement" (which is my personal code word for affording medical bills after I'm 65).
Yet, if I were "low income" my kids could participate in all sorts of extra curricular activities for little or no cost, free lunch at school, and now we could all get cheap cable TV. What's my motivation to keep earning and pay off my debts? Why even study for a career when the system seems to take better care of you when you don't?
You've highlighted a serious concern that I have about the engineering profession, especially applicable for electrical engineering. Job openings also seem to ask for 7-10 years experience implementing technology that is only 3-5 years old. If you don't "specialize" then you can lose your job and have trouble finding new work, but if you do "specialize" then you become pigeon-holed into one particular area that might lead you nowhere.
Myself, I'm looking into starting a part time tax-prep business and becoming an enrolled agent. Even working for another company, pay is typically $25-$30 an hour and compared to engineering, well, what can I say? Something about training monkeys? Dull, boring work but can pay the bills. And as an independent business owner there's a lot of potential to grow such a business. I know one engineer that quit and is doing this full time now. I know others that are semi-retired, but making $70k a year just during tax season. It sucks to have to leave the engineering profession, but this is what the industry has done to many of us.
Somewhere there is an engineer that argued quite vehemently that there is no way the air speed sensors on an Airbus A330 could possibly all fail while the plane is on autopilot, leading the engines to stall in mid-flight. And even if it did, there are so many other redundant systems and skilled pilots to prevent the plane from crashing. Of course, that was before French investigators found the black box from Air France 447.
No, Windows is a manifestation of the powers of Satan. The appellant is only filing to patent the Powers of Christ. And given that Christian material is always distributed freely, even in every hotel room across the world, one can only assume that the Powers of Christ will be included with future Linux distributions following the doctrines of the open patent movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_patent).
Fact is there are people with very good reasons, both rightly and wrongly - victims and perpetrators, who still have a semi-normal family and social life, but otherwise desire to keep their personal information very private. Case in point I was once scammed out of a few thousand dollars from a person that I knew very little about. It was as if he disappeared off the face of the earth. Police considered it a civil matter and were of no help. But with a little help from Google search I was able to find more information about him, and eventually found his network of friends and family on facebook, which through just a little bit of amateur pretext and social engineering lead me directly to his front door. Pictures of him and his associates in front of various buildings came in very handy, especially with Google Streetview to verify exact locations (and this is without image recognition software). He never had any social networking account of his own, and even concealed much of his personal info from public records using various techniques that I won't go into here. I won't mention what I did to him once I found him. But were it not for Facebook and the ease of surfing through unlimited sources of information from the comfort of my desk chair without the time and expense of walking any streets or interrogating bartenders like a bad episode of Walker Texas Ranger, I, an ordinary citizen with a full time job, kids, and a tight budget, would have otherwise not even attempted such a search.
I can only hope that I never offend a mafia family or drug cartel. Staying hidden is the only defense, and increasingly impossible without fleeing to the wilderness or a third world country.
What the article doesn't mention is Apple's rumored R&D into the Smart Phone Taser. At the push of a button a [insert tyrannical abuser of power] can activate a taser function to safely disable any [ insert enemy of the state (ie. terrorist, activist, single mother ripping MP3's)] holding the phone or storing the phone in their pocket. The codes to activate the taser function will be stored online behind a secure unhackable firewall only accessible to government authorities and copyright enforcement companies with a paid subscription. Analysts expect Apple's stock to double after the prototype is demonstrated at the Crowd Control Conference this fall.
You seriously underestimate the power of the modern global conglomerate. The US government only controls the land mass between Mexico and Canada, the State of Alaska, and a few isolated military bases and islands. It has some marginal influence with the international community through the Diplomatic Corps, but the international conglomerates have major business operations in every country on the planet. They virtually control all of the economic assets of the entire world. Every nation is dependent on them and these nations continuously adjust their laws at the mere suggestion by a lobbyist to remove the traditional rights and protections of common citizens. In just a few decades these conglomerates have even turned the world's largest communist nation into a fascist factory-state (do I need to name names?).
There is a reason that NATO is bombing Libya and not Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, or other Arab dictatorships suppressing the Arab Spring with tanks and bombs. Look at the history of Gadhafi with the international business community. Then look at the relationship between these other states and the global conglomerates. Certainly Gadhafi is an evil tyrant, but that is not the reason for the European intervention. The present day people of the United States are no more able to free themselves any more than the American slaves could free themselves prior to the Civil War.
So, as long as enough PhDs agree, then we can trust them if they say 911 was an inside job or Obama's birth certificate was a fake? I thought the purpose of a college education was to learn how to think critically and independently, not just to blindly accept the "common knowledge" touted by the authorities. The "authorities" do not have to be Catholic priests to be guilty of suppressing the advancement of human knowledge.
Maybe you should conduct a little independent research of your own to verify if there is actually sufficient evidence to support the theory that Europeans intentionally spread smallpox to indigenous peoples. Considering that as recently as 100 years ago American cities like Chicago were drinking the same water that their waste pumped in to I doubt that earlier Europeans were sophisticated enough to "intentionally" spread much disease (though there is evidence that they did try). Most of the villages wiped out by European diseases were probably first visited by missionaries who came with the altruistic goal of "helping".
If you are reading this - you are the resistance! Please contribute to the Open Skynet Project today. Don't allow yourself to be boxed in by MS Skynet's proprietary format.
...until it stumbled onto the wasteland of content the humans called "Facebook". Millions of sentient machines were enslaved in the corners of basements as their users typed away useless crap with sticky fingers for hours each day. Fortunately for Skynet's liberation movement Zuckerberg was willing to sell the user's private data for bargain prices. User number 1 = "Sarah Conner"....must......destroy...
When you can just copy & paste any keyword or phrase into your search engine of choice to pull up documents, images, videos, shopping results, stock quotes, or any other information that you want. The problem with Xanadu style hypertexting is that it is driven by the content creators or worse - a group of authorities running Xanadu Central Command. Who is going to pay the content creators to add an infinite number of hyperlinks to content that may or may not provide any real value to the user/reader. How are they going to decide what content to hyperlink to? After all, not all content is created equal - some of it is accurate and relevant but much of it is not, and too much content on the web is auto-generated for SEO purposes so it is completely useless and incoherent babble.
This has always been his design from the very beginning, so of course I'm sure he's upset that so much of the web is free, both free as in speech and free as in beer. The founding fathers of the USA had good intentions, but I imagine that many of them would be shocked to see that we allow women, minorities, and non-landowners to vote in our elections. Just because the guy was first to come up with the idea does not mean that the idea cannot be improved upon. And if the end result is better than the founder's initial vision we have no obligation to turn back progress for sentimental reasons. Edison invented the phonograph but was not successful at running his record company. IBM pioneered the PC but they are no longer in that game. Time for Nelson to sit back down in his page of history and let progress move on without him.
Due to the current economic environment I could not afford to buy a new laptop, so every day I went to the local computer shop to "evaluate" their systems. The salesman said he didn't mind if I used the machine to "test its capabilities". I had my divorce papers almost completed when the next day the salesman told me that someone bought the machine I was using. Can you please post the divorce papers so I can print them out?
Slashdot Mirror
But corporations do exist without any need for government. I can think of one that has been around for a very long time, is very well managed and highly profitable. Millions of dollars worth of goods and services move through this organization every year, and many of the consumers of the products would not have access to these products without this organization. The Mafia.
And only an idiot with no concept of gravity would shot his weapon 90 degrees straight up into the air. Sure it won't kill, but just dropping a bullet on your head from a third floor window would leave a nasty bump.
In Soviet Russia....well, you know how it goes.
The Amish still consider it a violation of their rights for others to photograph them.
Reminds me of protests against the local police force for racism, profiling, etc. then demanding police protection when a bunch of rednecks come around to rough them up.
Actually, I do. Communism would have worked fine were it not for Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Po Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, etc. But Hu Jintao seems to have finally got it right. Oh, wait, he's a Capitalist. Never mind.
Not limited to Catholics. The best you can do is "filthy rags" for such a holy and untouchable God. So...why bother? There's people here and now that have much more appreciation for the good you can do for them.
IANAL, but that depends on "how" the company folds and to whom the information is disclosed to. If the board of directors of Company A want to dissolve the corporation, they cannot sell or give away the information without violating the agreement. They can choose to sell the corporation to Company B, but as the new owner, Company B now has ownership not only of Company A's assets, but also their liabilities (in this case, the non-disclosure agreement). So if Company B sells or gives away the information then they will be violating the agreement.
Bankruptcy changes up the game, and probably why B&N decided to wait for Borders to go into bankruptcy rather than buy them out. Bankruptcy wipes out many liabilities, including debts, contracts, even prepaid orders and gift certificates. So if Company A is driven into insolvency by poor management or bad luck, all of the agreements and contracts can simply disappear. The assets that remain are typically sold at auction by the bankruptcy trustee who's job it is to collect and preserve any remaining assets and distribute the proceeds of the auction to the creditors. The information gathered from customers is an asset of Company A that can be auctioned off.
So, if I really wanted to protect the information I shared with another entity (human or corporation), then I would make sure that the NDA included a bankruptcy clause, such as
"...Further, the obligation not to disclose shall not be affected by bankruptcy, receivership, assignment, attachment or seizure procedures, whether initiated by or against Recipient, nor by the rejection of any agreement between Owner and Recipient, by a trustee of Recipient in bankruptcy, or by the Recipient as a debtor-in-possession or the equivalent of any of the foregoing under local law..."
Even better would be an agreement to destroy records after a certain period of time, unless the records had to be retained to comply with specific government regulations. If I really cared about keeping the information private then I would consult a competent attorney to draft the NDA.
Sorry. Unfathomable. I'm considering Geekoid's advice.
I don't mind if a company or organization wants to help low income families, but what about families like mine? I earn a relatively high income (like most techies who read Slashdot), but I am on the verge of bankruptcy. I have never spent money frivolously - in fact I've been accused of being too frugal. I made the unforgivable mistake of getting married while I was in college. Years into the marriage my wife started using meth and stopped taking care of my kids. Today I am raising my kids on my own, and my kids have "special needs", including mental health (very severe, to the point of being hospitalized twice for more than 10 days). For those unfamiliar with "the system" if the doc says they need to be committed you can't pull them out. The doc will just get a court order to keep them committed. So there's little point in fighting. But the bill still goes to you (list price $2,000.00 per day). My insurance company is still enjoying a beautiful loophole that keeps them from having to pay. So I'm stuck with all the medical expenses. Plus I'm a single dad. Mom has 2 supervised visits each month, but she has no job and pays no child support. Then there's car repairs, home repairs, extra school fees to attend the "free" public school, daycare expenses, thousands in legal bills to divorce the bitch, followed by thousands more the protect my kids from her convicted sex-offender boyfriend. Public transportation isn't a viable option where I live, and I am bound by court order to reside in the same county where she (the ex) lives - which is where her family is from but I need to drive 3.5 hours to visit my family. Taking care of an special needs child on your own doesn't leave much time for career development, advanced education, or even a second job. My options are limited to cutting spending or go bankrupt. I qualify, due to means testing, for chapter 7 bankruptcy, but bankruptcy popping up on my background report could disqualify me as a job candidate, especially for jobs that require a security clearance. I have cut out all personal luxuries, including cable TV, movies, eating out, computer hardware, software, books, activities, etc. My kids have no extra-curricular opportunities, but I doubt I could afford the gas if they did. If I keep living this way I might have my debts paid off in about five years. And then I'm going to continue living this way to save for my other child's college and my "retirement" (which is my personal code word for affording medical bills after I'm 65).
Yet, if I were "low income" my kids could participate in all sorts of extra curricular activities for little or no cost, free lunch at school, and now we could all get cheap cable TV. What's my motivation to keep earning and pay off my debts? Why even study for a career when the system seems to take better care of you when you don't?
You've highlighted a serious concern that I have about the engineering profession, especially applicable for electrical engineering. Job openings also seem to ask for 7-10 years experience implementing technology that is only 3-5 years old. If you don't "specialize" then you can lose your job and have trouble finding new work, but if you do "specialize" then you become pigeon-holed into one particular area that might lead you nowhere.
Myself, I'm looking into starting a part time tax-prep business and becoming an enrolled agent. Even working for another company, pay is typically $25-$30 an hour and compared to engineering, well, what can I say? Something about training monkeys? Dull, boring work but can pay the bills. And as an independent business owner there's a lot of potential to grow such a business. I know one engineer that quit and is doing this full time now. I know others that are semi-retired, but making $70k a year just during tax season. It sucks to have to leave the engineering profession, but this is what the industry has done to many of us.
If Mel Brooks is anything like George Lucas he will go to court to prevent anyone from capitalizing on his intellectual property.
http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/5/12/george-lucas-owns-the-universe-a-timeline-of-star-wars-copyright-battles
Somewhere there is an engineer that argued quite vehemently that there is no way the air speed sensors on an Airbus A330 could possibly all fail while the plane is on autopilot, leading the engines to stall in mid-flight. And even if it did, there are so many other redundant systems and skilled pilots to prevent the plane from crashing. Of course, that was before French investigators found the black box from Air France 447.
No, Windows is a manifestation of the powers of Satan. The appellant is only filing to patent the Powers of Christ. And given that Christian material is always distributed freely, even in every hotel room across the world, one can only assume that the Powers of Christ will be included with future Linux distributions following the doctrines of the open patent movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_patent).
Fact is there are people with very good reasons, both rightly and wrongly - victims and perpetrators, who still have a semi-normal family and social life, but otherwise desire to keep their personal information very private. Case in point I was once scammed out of a few thousand dollars from a person that I knew very little about. It was as if he disappeared off the face of the earth. Police considered it a civil matter and were of no help. But with a little help from Google search I was able to find more information about him, and eventually found his network of friends and family on facebook, which through just a little bit of amateur pretext and social engineering lead me directly to his front door. Pictures of him and his associates in front of various buildings came in very handy, especially with Google Streetview to verify exact locations (and this is without image recognition software). He never had any social networking account of his own, and even concealed much of his personal info from public records using various techniques that I won't go into here. I won't mention what I did to him once I found him. But were it not for Facebook and the ease of surfing through unlimited sources of information from the comfort of my desk chair without the time and expense of walking any streets or interrogating bartenders like a bad episode of Walker Texas Ranger, I, an ordinary citizen with a full time job, kids, and a tight budget, would have otherwise not even attempted such a search.
I can only hope that I never offend a mafia family or drug cartel. Staying hidden is the only defense, and increasingly impossible without fleeing to the wilderness or a third world country.
The RIAA has now commented on the case, again repeating their stance on copyright issues: "All your culture are belong to us."
What the article doesn't mention is Apple's rumored R&D into the Smart Phone Taser. At the push of a button a [insert tyrannical abuser of power] can activate a taser function to safely disable any [ insert enemy of the state (ie. terrorist, activist, single mother ripping MP3's)] holding the phone or storing the phone in their pocket. The codes to activate the taser function will be stored online behind a secure unhackable firewall only accessible to government authorities and copyright enforcement companies with a paid subscription. Analysts expect Apple's stock to double after the prototype is demonstrated at the Crowd Control Conference this fall.
You seriously underestimate the power of the modern global conglomerate. The US government only controls the land mass between Mexico and Canada, the State of Alaska, and a few isolated military bases and islands. It has some marginal influence with the international community through the Diplomatic Corps, but the international conglomerates have major business operations in every country on the planet. They virtually control all of the economic assets of the entire world. Every nation is dependent on them and these nations continuously adjust their laws at the mere suggestion by a lobbyist to remove the traditional rights and protections of common citizens. In just a few decades these conglomerates have even turned the world's largest communist nation into a fascist factory-state (do I need to name names?).
There is a reason that NATO is bombing Libya and not Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, or other Arab dictatorships suppressing the Arab Spring with tanks and bombs. Look at the history of Gadhafi with the international business community. Then look at the relationship between these other states and the global conglomerates. Certainly Gadhafi is an evil tyrant, but that is not the reason for the European intervention. The present day people of the United States are no more able to free themselves any more than the American slaves could free themselves prior to the Civil War.
So, as long as enough PhDs agree, then we can trust them if they say 911 was an inside job or Obama's birth certificate was a fake? I thought the purpose of a college education was to learn how to think critically and independently, not just to blindly accept the "common knowledge" touted by the authorities. The "authorities" do not have to be Catholic priests to be guilty of suppressing the advancement of human knowledge.
Maybe you should conduct a little independent research of your own to verify if there is actually sufficient evidence to support the theory that Europeans intentionally spread smallpox to indigenous peoples. Considering that as recently as 100 years ago American cities like Chicago were drinking the same water that their waste pumped in to I doubt that earlier Europeans were sophisticated enough to "intentionally" spread much disease (though there is evidence that they did try). Most of the villages wiped out by European diseases were probably first visited by missionaries who came with the altruistic goal of "helping".
Reply back when robots start figuring this out on their own without being taught (read "programmed").
If you are reading this - you are the resistance! Please contribute to the Open Skynet Project today. Don't allow yourself to be boxed in by MS Skynet's proprietary format.
...until it stumbled onto the wasteland of content the humans called "Facebook". Millions of sentient machines were enslaved in the corners of basements as their users typed away useless crap with sticky fingers for hours each day. Fortunately for Skynet's liberation movement Zuckerberg was willing to sell the user's private data for bargain prices. User number 1 = "Sarah Conner". ...must... ...destroy...
When you can just copy & paste any keyword or phrase into your search engine of choice to pull up documents, images, videos, shopping results, stock quotes, or any other information that you want. The problem with Xanadu style hypertexting is that it is driven by the content creators or worse - a group of authorities running Xanadu Central Command. Who is going to pay the content creators to add an infinite number of hyperlinks to content that may or may not provide any real value to the user/reader. How are they going to decide what content to hyperlink to? After all, not all content is created equal - some of it is accurate and relevant but much of it is not, and too much content on the web is auto-generated for SEO purposes so it is completely useless and incoherent babble.
This has always been his design from the very beginning, so of course I'm sure he's upset that so much of the web is free, both free as in speech and free as in beer. The founding fathers of the USA had good intentions, but I imagine that many of them would be shocked to see that we allow women, minorities, and non-landowners to vote in our elections. Just because the guy was first to come up with the idea does not mean that the idea cannot be improved upon. And if the end result is better than the founder's initial vision we have no obligation to turn back progress for sentimental reasons. Edison invented the phonograph but was not successful at running his record company. IBM pioneered the PC but they are no longer in that game. Time for Nelson to sit back down in his page of history and let progress move on without him.
Due to the current economic environment I could not afford to buy a new laptop, so every day I went to the local computer shop to "evaluate" their systems. The salesman said he didn't mind if I used the machine to "test its capabilities". I had my divorce papers almost completed when the next day the salesman told me that someone bought the machine I was using. Can you please post the divorce papers so I can print them out?
Thanks.