Isn't their tagline "it's everywhere you want to be"...except what they think might be illegal, or wrong, or immoral....
If you want to make brand money as a cash replacement (which I assume is what their money cards are attempting to do), then you have to be a open carrier (allowing the end users to deal with the legal responsibility of their use of money). Once Visa picks and chooses what uses of their currency to allow, I have no way to know what the value of their currency is (because I don't know what I can do with it), and there's less point to using it over using cash (potential safety is helpful, but like a gift card, limitation in usage is a significant loss in value).
By announcing this loudly, they're telling their cash card holders that what they're holding isn't really cash, though Visa wishes to sell it as such. Maybe Visa's users will get the message.
...that they couldn't get before? The information from the attempted plane bombings and from 9/11 was obtained through legal sources, or rather through methods that were legal before 9/11. We had enough information to stop 9/11 - the problem was in understanding its significance, something that warrantless wiretapping will not help. Since the uses of this information will remain secret, no one has any control over the usefulness of the information (are we gathering useful intel or harrassing internal dissenters? don't know, can't tell); furthermore, the secrecy of the data is likely to make it harder to analyze and get to people who can use it effectively.
The law takes away substantial rights of citizens without oversight, and doesn't appear destined to help much (if you could get warrants from a secret court for surveillance after the fact, this doesn't seem likely to get you much more information, and it doesn't help in the analysis of information, which would appear to be the bottleneck). Unless there is some substantial improvement in intelligence gathering to counter the substantial erosion of rights it causes, it doesn't make much sense to applaud the law. If your friend trades his house for an oil-soaked plot below a disused gas station, you're not going to cheer the decision unless he explains about the winning lottery ticket found in the ruins or the missing gold buried in one of the tanks - otherwise, you'd be right to think him nuts.
Much of the funding for the physical and biological sciences comes from the federal government. Once you start trying to get money from the USG, you are playing an inherently political game - the overselling of research, for example, isn't rational but rather a tool to get people less informed than you to give them money. While the conditions for research funding aren't necessarily partisan, they are poltical by nature.
In addition, the ends to which science and technology strive are legitimate topics for societal and political discussion. Scientists have taken a wide variety of stands on the development and technology, such as nuclear weaponry, and expecting others to refrain from similar stands.
The problem with the current Adminstration isn't that politics have interfered with science, because they probably have for a long time, but that the people running the government try to exclude or ignore any opinions or data that do not support their goals. It uses science like bad management uses management consultants - to give support for actions already decided on. Reality is less forgiving of studied and steadfast ignorance than any group of people could hope to be; the selective use of science or the use of flawed science or reasoning to support a policy makes the policy less likely to succeed. The variety of interference in scientific decision making only makes the goals that the Administration claims to desire harder to reach, and increases their costs.
We spy on everyone else, and as many countries as possibly can (including, probably, our allies). Why does anyone allow such spying if they have the power to stop it - I would have thought that we could have stopped the Soviet satellites from doing so, for example. Part of the merit to spying is that it makes the world more predictable - in a world with lots of capable powers, if the cards on the table, it makes things more regular and allows problems to be solved before they become costly, either in lives or money.
Blinding US satellites is a concern not only because the Chinese have something they don't want others to see (everyone has those) but because they believe they don't have to play nice, either because they have things other people want and so don't have to be nice (which will probably end badly when someone gets fed up with it) or because they believe that they have the capacity to change the rules to their liking, which unusually ends up in war with the people who benefit from the rules as they are. Neither seems like a good thing.
When has Gartner's advice actually helped a company (stay in business, or do better, I mean, not fire all their employees and go bankrupt)? How about management consultants in general?
Funny, it seems like you have the wrong monkeys and the wrong tune.
Because the reason lots of people's jobs are threatened/are leaving is because people with no stake in and little knowledge of the processes that go into doing any variety of things are taken as gurus by people who also don't know better, and who care about nothing other than that they want to make money now and don't intend to be around when the crap hits the fan.
These people enable the moronic management that has felled many a company. As long as there is money to be made in prolonging a problem, they will be there to help and to bill. The fact that there may be diamonds in the steaming piles of crap they continue to release does not justify their existence, nor any regard for their opinion.
Instead of the PS2, containing functionality I was sure I would use, at a price I could justify to myself, I could buy a really expensive game system with expensive games that contains one of two competing formats for a technology I don't either need or want. At best, I'm buying a better version of the PS2 at three times the cost with more expensive games - at worst, I'm buying a really expensive game system with no other use. Considering Sony's opinion that people will buy the PS3 whatever the cost, Blu-Ray isn't Sony's burden to bear, but that of their customers.
I don't care so much about Sony's rootkit evils (though they are evil) - it seems like they're trying to avoid another Betamax by attaching a proprietary technology to another popular item, and hoping that it will drive sales of their format. They either don't realize or don't care that the (relatively low) price is part of what made the PS2 popular, and by adding so much expensive functionality to the PS3 they are negating that advantage. I can't see spending $600 (or even $500) on a game system, and much of their game market would seem to be in the same boat - though they would also be in that boat if the PS3 used HD-DVD as its format, people might be able to justify the cost by the presence of an added next-gen DVD player, while now they just have an expensive bet on the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war.
that managers belonging to the "Silver Bullet of the Month Club" will even read that far? I thought that books like this were for sitting on one's bookshelf, to convince your employees that you're working really hard to make everything better, not for actual consumption.
Saving $5e9 is great over three years, but 1e8 machines are going to cost at least $5e10 ($500/machine) - it could be as low as $100/machine, but for most people, probably at least $500/machine, or more. 3% return/year isn't going to wow anyone.
The energy savings are nice, but unless electricity spikes again or electric cars become commonplace (driving electricity costs up again), the upfront cost of replacing that many machines is a big pill to swallow just for the electricity savings.
We can say that the Earth is getting warmer, but people aren't sure why. What you do depends on why - if human-created CO2 is the cause, the solution is to get CO2 out of the air and reduce our production of it - by switching fuel sources, increasing energy efficiency, and increasing the amount of growing areas. If we aren't causing the changes, however, changing the earth's climate cycles might be the wrong thing to do - if not all cycles are stable and consistent with habitation, we have the potential (perhaps) to drive ourselves out of existence in ways we don't even know. In that case, the response would be to mitigate the effects rather than change the cycles. Reducing human CO2 emissions would help (by minimally perturbing the natural climate cycle), but the main consequences would not necessarily be changed by doing so. In that scenario, changing CO2 concentrations would be spending resources better used to mitigate the effects of global warming.
The problem with your analogy is that putting out a fire in your living room has only one reasonable course of action (well maybe two - getting out being the other one), and the consequences of the actions for continued residence in the house are predictable, whereas with global warming (human or not) the consequences of our actions (now and in the future) are less easily predicted.
I don't think Sony wants to think that the issues with BlueRay (and its questionableness as the future HD DVD standard) and the cost of the PS3 and of its games is driving away its customers. (I would like to think that their insistence on proprietary, crippled standards for media and their rootkit fiasco have hurt them in the eyes of their customers, but I doubt it.)
Given the choice between conditions which they don't want to change (or which would require painful internal changes to implement) or a condition which they might change easily or which would absolve them of possible blame for a shortfall in PS3 sales, which do you think Sony would choose to acknowledge?
IBM's lawyers are more like the dementors from the Harry Potter series, and I think most people are hoping that that cold feeling SCO is having is the kiss of death to be imminently administered...rendering SCO the soulless entity we already believe it to be.
1) This assumes that you live in one of the places with an actual public transit system, such as NYC, Chicago, DC, or Boston. If you live in subway distance in any of those spots, you are going to pay substantially more in rent, food, and perhaps taxes than the average person. If you live in DC, or NYC, the likelihood of affordable housing within range is between slim and none - either you are driving to a park-and-ride terminal (negating that cost advantage) or you are taking trains/buses, etc. to get to the subway terminals (which significantly increase the time required). PT is better environmentally (as is city living), but its economic advantage (or rather the economic advantage when you live in a place that has PT that doesn't suck) is questionable.
2) It takes me (I live in OH) about 20 min. to get to work driving. If I took the bus, it would take 20 min. to walk to the stop, about 30 min. to get to the drop point, and 10 min. to walk to work, or about three times the time each way. I can only read for the middle part, so most of the time is wasted, and if the weather sucks, my walks are going to suck, though I will probably be healthier (less weight) from all the walking. I still need a car here to get other places (shopping, etc.), and the time I would spend (2 h/d, about 1/2 of which is useful, if that) is time that I can't spend on other things - for people with kids, the costs are higher because they are likely to have less free time in the first place. In most places (CA excepted), the time required for traveling by PT is significantly greater than traveling by car, even factoring the potential use of time on PT, and since cars are necessary anyway here, the cost differences don't help PT either.
The changes needed to make PT the dominant transportation in the US are substantial, and require substantial changes (population shifts) and costs (housing losses/costs). In most places in the US, PT is unviable (the low densities because land and gas are cheaper further out) and takes too much time for most people to use by choice.
If ignorance is no excuse for not being able to follow tax laws which even the people in charge of understanding and giving advice on (the US IRS) can misunderstand upwards of 20% of the time, why is it a reasonable excuse for a someone presented with the information who refused to read documents given him discussing the actions and left meetings discussing the spying? MH could have and should have known what was going on, and chose to be ignorant. If you knowingly evade knowledge, shouldn't that be analogous to the "unclean hands" doctrine in law (you can't evade knowledge and subsequently claim ignorance as a defense)?
As a sidebar, why does "responsibility" at this level not involve any actual negative consequences to the guilty parties? If one takes responsibility for an act, does that not require acceptance of the consequences caused and a good-faith effort to mitigate the consequences? In business, "responsibility" seems to mean "fire a bunch of people not you, wait a while, and get a large severence bonus when you retire'", unless you're not in charge, in which case it becomes "You're fired. Be glad we don't sue you and have you publicly flogged."
National Geographic did an article on this about 2-3 years ago - at $1.40/gal somewhere arount 30% of the price of a gallon (at that time about $0.40) was tax - since I don't think gas taxes have been raised much since, I would have to figure that the actuall tax rate on gas is about 20% of so - still highly taxed relative to most items, but not "most".
Of course, since much of the gas tax goes to road maintenance, the road maintenance money will have come from somewhere - either a general electricity tax, a tax on electricity service stations, or a monitor on cars to calculate tax/distance, so the point of your comment is still valid. Sorry.
If schools force students to give up rights to their work in school, I can't see those students having much respect for the copyrights (or other rights) of others. At some point, students will reach hypocrisy overload, and decide that the rules under which they labor and the people who make them are not worth obeying - at other times, the thought that those in power might have some respect and concern for them might have restrained most students from revolting too strongly, but in an age where their parents have spent the seed corn and are waiting for their children to grow some more, this is unlikely.
If society thinks that it can train people who will obey and buy while systematically removing their choices and rights, they will likely be sadly disappointed - what society is likely to get is a set of people who don't believe in rules because the rules are the tools of those in power, and who do what they want, and to whom others are irrelevant. Ultimately, rather than a society based on the rule of law, you get a society based on the Golden Rule ("who has the gold (or the guns) makes the rules."), and then chaos, as "slavery is no longer a viable basis for a society."
I don't know if this is discussed in the reference, but the housing market (and the increase in housing prices correlated with it) might be a substantial problem. A significant number of people have pulled value from their homes via home-equity loans, and if the loan rates are variable, increased interest rates simultaneously increase their payments and decrease the value of their house (by decreasing the market for their houses). Salary increases have not increased much more (if at all) above inflation, so that people make no more money in real terms than thirty years ago - so the increases in consumer spending have to come from somewhere, likely from their houses which no longer have the value they have drawn down on (like finding out the "extra" money you had and spent wasn't really extra, and now you owe it all and then some). In addition, some people have either interest-only mortgages or other variants, all of which have a grace period but all of whose payments will drastically increase at some point in the next year or two. These events would seem to pull lots of money out of the economy, worse if any of the mortgage lenders go under as well.
The other problem - do the tax cuts return more in taxes than they cost in direct lost income? Tax cuts are like a loan to spur growth - but if they don't return enough money, you have lots of debt and no way to pay it off, unless you cut spending (which means people have to pay for what the government no longer does) or raise taxes again.
This is a weak excuse, but it's never the CEO's fault if the company does poorly, so the excuse-making should be no surprise.
If you want something to go away, you don't jump up and down saying, "Burn this immediately! IMMEDIATELY!", because then everyone knows that this is important and one of your employees/minions/servants might save it anyway, either because you're evil and they want to screw you or because they think that you're shortsighted enough to want it gone now and back later and so they want to save you from yourself. Duh.
Of course, this is an argument for DRM - if this report had been DRMd (competently), there would probably be very few people with both the knowledge of the report and with the ability to circumvent the DRM so that if someone had wanted it gone, it likely would have been.
The USG is telling other governments what their rules on DRM and copyright ought to be, while their citizens of other countries have told their governments something else entirely. Do those governments (and, at least in theory, their citizens) have the right to determine what is sold in their countries, and if not, who should have that right?
The US does not allow drugs to be sold, nor does it allow contracts of various sorts (indentured servitude, for example), even if the parties consent to them. Should these laws be negated - if people do not wish to enter such contracts, they don't have to, right? Or does the power to choose what products should be sold and how rest solely with those in power in the US?
Why would the USG care about foreign consumers? The USG is only supposed to care about its citizens and their interests; it may choose to care about others insofar as caring about them helps its citizens and businesses either directly or indirectly, but caring for other peoples isn't their job.
This is likely to hurt people everywhere, however - while I probably don't mind Apple's DRM, if consumers have no choice but to accept DRM to get products they want, the restrictions imposed by DRM will likely become more onerous (or people won't buy our stuff, but I'm guessing the USG doesn't think this could happen). By encouraging the rest of the world to accept the company line on DRM, they want to make sure that everyone in the world is subject to the same restrictions as US citizens, who probably like the restrictions as much as we do. Once everyone plays the same DRM-encrypted tunes, it becomes easier to broaden the scope of DRM encrustation to other materials that either the USG, other governments, or large companies would like to control.
The emphasis on corporate or government control over consumers/citizens is a depressing trend, but not particularly surprising.
Kent State wasn't completely analogous (I think the protestors were throwing rocks at the National Guard), but the use of lethal weapons by the USG didn't get anyone thrown out of office, let alone ejected by force - many argue that it didn't even get the US out of Vietnam. Another possible use of sublethal force against protest might be the 1968 Democratic Convention ("We're not here to prevent disorder, we're here to preserve disorder."), but the consequences (or lack thereof) were similar. These events aroused no violent protest, and the use of nonlethal/sublethal weapons has less possibility of arousing rebellion than other acts - no bodies to be shown on the news after all, just protestors running for their lives, and people here have seen that before.
If you expect to fight wars of liberation, where enemies are distinguished readily from friends and where those who are left are capable of reestablishing government on their own, then building a military that can turn your enemies into smoking holes in the ground is a good idea; it is likely a part of the toolbox of any capable military force.
However, if we intend to invade/liberate countries without the ability to reestablish law and order (the Balkans/Iraq/North Korea?), then we would need some means to nonlethally restore order afterwards. Alternatively, the "smoking hole" theory of military force works when you have a distinct and limited set of enemies, such as those based on nationality. When your enemies live based on religion or ideas, the number of enemies can increase faster than your ability to destroy them (or, rather, the direct and indirect costs of destroying them can increase faster than you can withstand). Nonlethal methods make them more able to act against enemies without helping to generate more in the process.
If the military or the people running it are not trusted, then whatever weapons they possess will be viewed with fear and distrust; it is no different with nonlethal weapons as with lethal ones. If the military is going to develop nonlethal weapons, who should they test them on? (While COs might be nice guinea pigs, no one seems to expect CEOs to test their products personally in other circumstances, and so there isn't a consistent reason to expect them to be test dummies; if the weapons were actually lethal, this would pose an additional problem.) Better compensated and protected citizens than POWs, I think.
Since Microsoft's OS is the dominant home OS and one of the largest OS for business, the preparation and potential capabilities of its new OS seem like they would be worthy of more than average consideration, particularly since many of the people here might end up working on them and/or programming for them. The emphasis on DRM in Vista also seems worthy of consideration before it comes out, as once a nucleus of users have Vista, others will be forced to change to it (and its DRM) in order to preserve compatibility with others - thus dealing with the DRM before Vista comes out might prevent complaints about DRM from being so much tilting at windmills (and the users might know what they are getting).
Complaining about the lack of substantitive information in articles about Vista is legitimate, but the discussion of Vista does not seem to be misplaced, even before its release, because the consequences of its release for Microsoft users, for other programmers, and for related issues are significant and widespread.
Pay DVD prices for downloaded movies (for which you pay the shipping while not getting the features of the DVD) which you can only use on two computers, which can taken away at any time without recourse, to which can be added ads and other "features" you don't want while giving features which you may want but can't keep? What a bargain.
Why do the movie studios think I actually want this? Why don't they realize that if they don't allow their customers to use their product as they wish (without redistributing it or publically displaying it - you know, like fair use allowed before the b%$&*rds neutered it), then customers will find ways to get their product for which they will not be paid at all nor over which they will have any control? And why did Amazon think their customers would actually want this?
1) Scotts's money is scarce, not society's. They don't want to spend as much money on health care, so they don't want workers who smoke.
2) There is lots of good food - you can make it yourself, or buy from better restaurants - it just takes time and/or money. I don't think most of society's problems with obesity come from pesticide residues in plants, or from hazards associated from artificial sweetners - we likely eat too much of the wrong things, a situation that is readily changeable.
The question is, how much of my life does my employer get? Because if they wanted to spend less money on smoking-related problems, they could have chosen less restrictive ways to do it, so the fact that they did not says that lowering health care costs isn't their goals - controlling the lives of their employees is. Giving up control of my life to someone for whom my life has no benefit other than generating profit doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
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Isn't their tagline "it's everywhere you want to be"...except what they think might be illegal, or wrong, or immoral....
If you want to make brand money as a cash replacement (which I assume is what their money cards are attempting to do), then you have to be a open carrier (allowing the end users to deal with the legal responsibility of their use of money). Once Visa picks and chooses what uses of their currency to allow, I have no way to know what the value of their currency is (because I don't know what I can do with it), and there's less point to using it over using cash (potential safety is helpful, but like a gift card, limitation in usage is a significant loss in value).
By announcing this loudly, they're telling their cash card holders that what they're holding isn't really cash, though Visa wishes to sell it as such. Maybe Visa's users will get the message.
...that they couldn't get before? The information from the attempted plane bombings and from 9/11 was obtained through legal sources, or rather through methods that were legal before 9/11. We had enough information to stop 9/11 - the problem was in understanding its significance, something that warrantless wiretapping will not help. Since the uses of this information will remain secret, no one has any control over the usefulness of the information (are we gathering useful intel or harrassing internal dissenters? don't know, can't tell); furthermore, the secrecy of the data is likely to make it harder to analyze and get to people who can use it effectively.
The law takes away substantial rights of citizens without oversight, and doesn't appear destined to help much (if you could get warrants from a secret court for surveillance after the fact, this doesn't seem likely to get you much more information, and it doesn't help in the analysis of information, which would appear to be the bottleneck). Unless there is some substantial improvement in intelligence gathering to counter the substantial erosion of rights it causes, it doesn't make much sense to applaud the law. If your friend trades his house for an oil-soaked plot below a disused gas station, you're not going to cheer the decision unless he explains about the winning lottery ticket found in the ruins or the missing gold buried in one of the tanks - otherwise, you'd be right to think him nuts.
Much of the funding for the physical and biological sciences comes from the federal government. Once you start trying to get money from the USG, you are playing an inherently political game - the overselling of research, for example, isn't rational but rather a tool to get people less informed than you to give them money. While the conditions for research funding aren't necessarily partisan, they are poltical by nature.
In addition, the ends to which science and technology strive are legitimate topics for societal and political discussion. Scientists have taken a wide variety of stands on the development and technology, such as nuclear weaponry, and expecting others to refrain from similar stands.
The problem with the current Adminstration isn't that politics have interfered with science, because they probably have for a long time, but that the people running the government try to exclude or ignore any opinions or data that do not support their goals. It uses science like bad management uses management consultants - to give support for actions already decided on. Reality is less forgiving of studied and steadfast ignorance than any group of people could hope to be; the selective use of science or the use of flawed science or reasoning to support a policy makes the policy less likely to succeed. The variety of interference in scientific decision making only makes the goals that the Administration claims to desire harder to reach, and increases their costs.
We spy on everyone else, and as many countries as possibly can (including, probably, our allies). Why does anyone allow such spying if they have the power to stop it - I would have thought that we could have stopped the Soviet satellites from doing so, for example. Part of the merit to spying is that it makes the world more predictable - in a world with lots of capable powers, if the cards on the table, it makes things more regular and allows problems to be solved before they become costly, either in lives or money.
Blinding US satellites is a concern not only because the Chinese have something they don't want others to see (everyone has those) but because they believe they don't have to play nice, either because they have things other people want and so don't have to be nice (which will probably end badly when someone gets fed up with it) or because they believe that they have the capacity to change the rules to their liking, which unusually ends up in war with the people who benefit from the rules as they are. Neither seems like a good thing.
When has Gartner's advice actually helped a company (stay in business, or do better, I mean, not fire all their employees and go bankrupt)? How about management consultants in general?
Funny, it seems like you have the wrong monkeys and the wrong tune.
Because the reason lots of people's jobs are threatened/are leaving is because people with no stake in and little knowledge of the processes that go into doing any variety of things are taken as gurus by people who also don't know better, and who care about nothing other than that they want to make money now and don't intend to be around when the crap hits the fan.
These people enable the moronic management that has felled many a company. As long as there is money to be made in prolonging a problem, they will be there to help and to bill. The fact that there may be diamonds in the steaming piles of crap they continue to release does not justify their existence, nor any regard for their opinion.
Instead of the PS2, containing functionality I was sure I would use, at a price I could justify to myself, I could buy a really expensive game system with expensive games that contains one of two competing formats for a technology I don't either need or want. At best, I'm buying a better version of the PS2 at three times the cost with more expensive games - at worst, I'm buying a really expensive game system with no other use. Considering Sony's opinion that people will buy the PS3 whatever the cost, Blu-Ray isn't Sony's burden to bear, but that of their customers.
I don't care so much about Sony's rootkit evils (though they are evil) - it seems like they're trying to avoid another Betamax by attaching a proprietary technology to another popular item, and hoping that it will drive sales of their format. They either don't realize or don't care that the (relatively low) price is part of what made the PS2 popular, and by adding so much expensive functionality to the PS3 they are negating that advantage. I can't see spending $600 (or even $500) on a game system, and much of their game market would seem to be in the same boat - though they would also be in that boat if the PS3 used HD-DVD as its format, people might be able to justify the cost by the presence of an added next-gen DVD player, while now they just have an expensive bet on the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war.
that managers belonging to the "Silver Bullet of the Month Club" will even read that far? I thought that books like this were for sitting on one's bookshelf, to convince your employees that you're working really hard to make everything better, not for actual consumption.
Saving $5e9 is great over three years, but 1e8 machines are going to cost at least $5e10 ($500/machine) - it could be as low as $100/machine, but for most people, probably at least $500/machine, or more. 3% return/year isn't going to wow anyone.
The energy savings are nice, but unless electricity spikes again or electric cars become commonplace (driving electricity costs up again), the upfront cost of replacing that many machines is a big pill to swallow just for the electricity savings.
We can say that the Earth is getting warmer, but people aren't sure why. What you do depends on why - if human-created CO2 is the cause, the solution is to get CO2 out of the air and reduce our production of it - by switching fuel sources, increasing energy efficiency, and increasing the amount of growing areas. If we aren't causing the changes, however, changing the earth's climate cycles might be the wrong thing to do - if not all cycles are stable and consistent with habitation, we have the potential (perhaps) to drive ourselves out of existence in ways we don't even know. In that case, the response would be to mitigate the effects rather than change the cycles. Reducing human CO2 emissions would help (by minimally perturbing the natural climate cycle), but the main consequences would not necessarily be changed by doing so. In that scenario, changing CO2 concentrations would be spending resources better used to mitigate the effects of global warming.
The problem with your analogy is that putting out a fire in your living room has only one reasonable course of action (well maybe two - getting out being the other one), and the consequences of the actions for continued residence in the house are predictable, whereas with global warming (human or not) the consequences of our actions (now and in the future) are less easily predicted.
I don't think Sony wants to think that the issues with BlueRay (and its questionableness as the future HD DVD standard) and the cost of the PS3 and of its games is driving away its customers. (I would like to think that their insistence on proprietary, crippled standards for media and their rootkit fiasco have hurt them in the eyes of their customers, but I doubt it.)
Given the choice between conditions which they don't want to change (or which would require painful internal changes to implement) or a condition which they might change easily or which would absolve them of possible blame for a shortfall in PS3 sales, which do you think Sony would choose to acknowledge?
IBM's lawyers are more like the dementors from the Harry Potter series, and I think most people are hoping that that cold feeling SCO is having is the kiss of death to be imminently administered...rendering SCO the soulless entity we already believe it to be.
1) This assumes that you live in one of the places with an actual public transit system, such as NYC, Chicago, DC, or Boston. If you live in subway distance in any of those spots, you are going to pay substantially more in rent, food, and perhaps taxes than the average person. If you live in DC, or NYC, the likelihood of affordable housing within range is between slim and none - either you are driving to a park-and-ride terminal (negating that cost advantage) or you are taking trains/buses, etc. to get to the subway terminals (which significantly increase the time required). PT is better environmentally (as is city living), but its economic advantage (or rather the economic advantage when you live in a place that has PT that doesn't suck) is questionable.
2) It takes me (I live in OH) about 20 min. to get to work driving. If I took the bus, it would take 20 min. to walk to the stop, about 30 min. to get to the drop point, and 10 min. to walk to work, or about three times the time each way. I can only read for the middle part, so most of the time is wasted, and if the weather sucks, my walks are going to suck, though I will probably be healthier (less weight) from all the walking. I still need a car here to get other places (shopping, etc.), and the time I would spend (2 h/d, about 1/2 of which is useful, if that) is time that I can't spend on other things - for people with kids, the costs are higher because they are likely to have less free time in the first place. In most places (CA excepted), the time required for traveling by PT is significantly greater than traveling by car, even factoring the potential use of time on PT, and since cars are necessary anyway here, the cost differences don't help PT either.
The changes needed to make PT the dominant transportation in the US are substantial, and require substantial changes (population shifts) and costs (housing losses/costs). In most places in the US, PT is unviable (the low densities because land and gas are cheaper further out) and takes too much time for most people to use by choice.
If ignorance is no excuse for not being able to follow tax laws which even the people in charge of understanding and giving advice on (the US IRS) can misunderstand upwards of 20% of the time, why is it a reasonable excuse for a someone presented with the information who refused to read documents given him discussing the actions and left meetings discussing the spying? MH could have and should have known what was going on, and chose to be ignorant. If you knowingly evade knowledge, shouldn't that be analogous to the "unclean hands" doctrine in law (you can't evade knowledge and subsequently claim ignorance as a defense)?
As a sidebar, why does "responsibility" at this level not involve any actual negative consequences to the guilty parties? If one takes responsibility for an act, does that not require acceptance of the consequences caused and a good-faith effort to mitigate the consequences? In business, "responsibility" seems to mean "fire a bunch of people not you, wait a while, and get a large severence bonus when you retire'", unless you're not in charge, in which case it becomes "You're fired. Be glad we don't sue you and have you publicly flogged."
National Geographic did an article on this about 2-3 years ago - at $1.40/gal somewhere arount 30% of the price of a gallon (at that time about $0.40) was tax - since I don't think gas taxes have been raised much since, I would have to figure that the actuall tax rate on gas is about 20% of so - still highly taxed relative to most items, but not "most".
Of course, since much of the gas tax goes to road maintenance, the road maintenance money will have come from somewhere - either a general electricity tax, a tax on electricity service stations, or a monitor on cars to calculate tax/distance, so the point of your comment is still valid. Sorry.
If schools force students to give up rights to their work in school, I can't see those students having much respect for the copyrights (or other rights) of others. At some point, students will reach hypocrisy overload, and decide that the rules under which they labor and the people who make them are not worth obeying - at other times, the thought that those in power might have some respect and concern for them might have restrained most students from revolting too strongly, but in an age where their parents have spent the seed corn and are waiting for their children to grow some more, this is unlikely.
If society thinks that it can train people who will obey and buy while systematically removing their choices and rights, they will likely be sadly disappointed - what society is likely to get is a set of people who don't believe in rules because the rules are the tools of those in power, and who do what they want, and to whom others are irrelevant. Ultimately, rather than a society based on the rule of law, you get a society based on the Golden Rule ("who has the gold (or the guns) makes the rules."), and then chaos, as "slavery is no longer a viable basis for a society."
I don't know if this is discussed in the reference, but the housing market (and the increase in housing prices correlated with it) might be a substantial problem. A significant number of people have pulled value from their homes via home-equity loans, and if the loan rates are variable, increased interest rates simultaneously increase their payments and decrease the value of their house (by decreasing the market for their houses). Salary increases have not increased much more (if at all) above inflation, so that people make no more money in real terms than thirty years ago - so the increases in consumer spending have to come from somewhere, likely from their houses which no longer have the value they have drawn down on (like finding out the "extra" money you had and spent wasn't really extra, and now you owe it all and then some). In addition, some people have either interest-only mortgages or other variants, all of which have a grace period but all of whose payments will drastically increase at some point in the next year or two. These events would seem to pull lots of money out of the economy, worse if any of the mortgage lenders go under as well.
The other problem - do the tax cuts return more in taxes than they cost in direct lost income? Tax cuts are like a loan to spur growth - but if they don't return enough money, you have lots of debt and no way to pay it off, unless you cut spending (which means people have to pay for what the government no longer does) or raise taxes again.
This is a weak excuse, but it's never the CEO's fault if the company does poorly, so the excuse-making should be no surprise.
If you want something to go away, you don't jump up and down saying, "Burn this immediately! IMMEDIATELY!", because then everyone knows that this is important and one of your employees/minions/servants might save it anyway, either because you're evil and they want to screw you or because they think that you're shortsighted enough to want it gone now and back later and so they want to save you from yourself. Duh.
Of course, this is an argument for DRM - if this report had been DRMd (competently), there would probably be very few people with both the knowledge of the report and with the ability to circumvent the DRM so that if someone had wanted it gone, it likely would have been.
That's a good thing, right? [crickets chirping]
The USG is telling other governments what their rules on DRM and copyright ought to be, while their citizens of other countries have told their governments something else entirely. Do those governments (and, at least in theory, their citizens) have the right to determine what is sold in their countries, and if not, who should have that right?
The US does not allow drugs to be sold, nor does it allow contracts of various sorts (indentured servitude, for example), even if the parties consent to them. Should these laws be negated - if people do not wish to enter such contracts, they don't have to, right? Or does the power to choose what products should be sold and how rest solely with those in power in the US?
Why would the USG care about foreign consumers? The USG is only supposed to care about its citizens and their interests; it may choose to care about others insofar as caring about them helps its citizens and businesses either directly or indirectly, but caring for other peoples isn't their job.
This is likely to hurt people everywhere, however - while I probably don't mind Apple's DRM, if consumers have no choice but to accept DRM to get products they want, the restrictions imposed by DRM will likely become more onerous (or people won't buy our stuff, but I'm guessing the USG doesn't think this could happen). By encouraging the rest of the world to accept the company line on DRM, they want to make sure that everyone in the world is subject to the same restrictions as US citizens, who probably like the restrictions as much as we do. Once everyone plays the same DRM-encrypted tunes, it becomes easier to broaden the scope of DRM encrustation to other materials that either the USG, other governments, or large companies would like to control.
The emphasis on corporate or government control over consumers/citizens is a depressing trend, but not particularly surprising.
Kent State wasn't completely analogous (I think the protestors were throwing rocks at the National Guard), but the use of lethal weapons by the USG didn't get anyone thrown out of office, let alone ejected by force - many argue that it didn't even get the US out of Vietnam. Another possible use of sublethal force against protest might be the 1968 Democratic Convention ("We're not here to prevent disorder, we're here to preserve disorder."), but the consequences (or lack thereof) were similar. These events aroused no violent protest, and the use of nonlethal/sublethal weapons has less possibility of arousing rebellion than other acts - no bodies to be shown on the news after all, just protestors running for their lives, and people here have seen that before.
If you expect to fight wars of liberation, where enemies are distinguished readily from friends and where those who are left are capable of reestablishing government on their own, then building a military that can turn your enemies into smoking holes in the ground is a good idea; it is likely a part of the toolbox of any capable military force.
However, if we intend to invade/liberate countries without the ability to reestablish law and order (the Balkans/Iraq/North Korea?), then we would need some means to nonlethally restore order afterwards. Alternatively, the "smoking hole" theory of military force works when you have a distinct and limited set of enemies, such as those based on nationality. When your enemies live based on religion or ideas, the number of enemies can increase faster than your ability to destroy them (or, rather, the direct and indirect costs of destroying them can increase faster than you can withstand). Nonlethal methods make them more able to act against enemies without helping to generate more in the process.
If the military or the people running it are not trusted, then whatever weapons they possess will be viewed with fear and distrust; it is no different with nonlethal weapons as with lethal ones. If the military is going to develop nonlethal weapons, who should they test them on? (While COs might be nice guinea pigs, no one seems to expect CEOs to test their products personally in other circumstances, and so there isn't a consistent reason to expect them to be test dummies; if the weapons were actually lethal, this would pose an additional problem.) Better compensated and protected citizens than POWs, I think.
Since Microsoft's OS is the dominant home OS and one of the largest OS for business, the preparation and potential capabilities of its new OS seem like they would be worthy of more than average consideration, particularly since many of the people here might end up working on them and/or programming for them. The emphasis on DRM in Vista also seems worthy of consideration before it comes out, as once a nucleus of users have Vista, others will be forced to change to it (and its DRM) in order to preserve compatibility with others - thus dealing with the DRM before Vista comes out might prevent complaints about DRM from being so much tilting at windmills (and the users might know what they are getting).
Complaining about the lack of substantitive information in articles about Vista is legitimate, but the discussion of Vista does not seem to be misplaced, even before its release, because the consequences of its release for Microsoft users, for other programmers, and for related issues are significant and widespread.
Pay DVD prices for downloaded movies (for which you pay the shipping while not getting the features of the DVD) which you can only use on two computers, which can taken away at any time without recourse, to which can be added ads and other "features" you don't want while giving features which you may want but can't keep? What a bargain.
Why do the movie studios think I actually want this? Why don't they realize that if they don't allow their customers to use their product as they wish (without redistributing it or publically displaying it - you know, like fair use allowed before the b%$&*rds neutered it), then customers will find ways to get their product for which they will not be paid at all nor over which they will have any control? And why did Amazon think their customers would actually want this?
Dumb@$$es.
1) Scotts's money is scarce, not society's. They don't want to spend as much money on health care, so they don't want workers who smoke.
2) There is lots of good food - you can make it yourself, or buy from better restaurants - it just takes time and/or money. I don't think most of society's problems with obesity come from pesticide residues in plants, or from hazards associated from artificial sweetners - we likely eat too much of the wrong things, a situation that is readily changeable.
The question is, how much of my life does my employer get? Because if they wanted to spend less money on smoking-related problems, they could have chosen less restrictive ways to do it, so the fact that they did not says that lowering health care costs isn't their goals - controlling the lives of their employees is. Giving up control of my life to someone for whom my life has no benefit other than generating profit doesn't seem like a good idea to me.