"Now, after faithfully giving 15-20 years of their life to bettering your company you would just cut them off to go start over somewhere else?"

If the gov't allowed it, most businessmen would. Very few consumers (outside of a few industries) care about the ethics of the company they're (usually indirectly) buying from. Most of us buy from China (I sure do). Most of us don't have time to look up the history of every corporation we buy from. Shareholders... forget about it, most of them use mutual funds. Because of that, you have a choice: make more money, or be ethical. You or I might go for the latter, but our company would eventually fail or get eaten up (outside of a few industries).

"Now.. if they cannot or will not learn to perform a new task... then sure, go ahead and can them."

The problem here is the company gets to choose the task. So they'll gradually make the person work harder and more hours for the same money. If the guy leaves, good we wanted to fire him anyway, and if he stays, also good because he's overworked. It creates a sort of "race to the bottom" among poorer people that is basically the biggest pitfall of uncontrolled capitalism (or overpopulation possibly).

The rest here is just rant.

There's lot of gov't regulations that could be put into place to help; incentives for hiring, penalties for "needless" layoffs, etc. In my opinion the most important in terms of controlling unemployment would be incentives for shorter hours, but that's just one of many, and I'm not an expert.

But wait! The companies with the most money to lobby (bribe) congress, bribe media, buy ad slots, etc. are the unethical ones. And the only regulation they're big on is corporate welfare. Damn.

I guess this is what happens when we have a really stable society. It's awesome that we have one, but it makes it harder to put any real pressure on top officials in government (who are supposed to, in theory, put pressure on corporation management). They'd be all like "what are you gonna do, rebel?" and we'd be all like "nah guess not" and they'd be all like "yeah that's right" and we'd be all like "Well we'll just do subtle things that will hopefully piss you off and write music about it" and they'd be all like "yeah whatever" etc.[/bum review]

Luckily, there are elections to balance the power.

And a good laugh was had by all.

You must be right, because I've never heard of a privacy-based definition of democracy, so if that's what the original definition was, then yes, it has been lost.

When I think of democracy, I think of people having voting power over how their gov't is run, which no country has ever really had in full form. I mean you can vote on people, but not on issues or events, making for a weak level of democracy.

If you can convince me most people in Britain think this is bad, then yeah, I guess this is another blow against it.

It would have been more appropriate if they axed it years ago.

Well, police are apt to arrest for any law, whereas an non-cop doesn't have that responsibility. Hopefully, most people who see someone smoking a joint will just ignore it. Some people will report it but at least not everyone will. It might be a small shift to people collectively deciding what laws are worth enforcing, instead of a central body.

Anyone who snoops incorrectly will be meta-snooped and won't get as many snoop points. Thus, everything will be forever moderated correctly on Slashdot. I mean Britain.

How about if you had to login through some sort of secure channel to prove who you are before looking at the cameras or reporting arrests? With the right controls it would be difficult to grief without being arrested yourself. Not saying they're going to do that but if they do?

Someone outside of the Inner Party having access to the CCTVs is not Orwellian unless everyone is tasked with reaching an arrest quota. One small potential plus is that society kind of gets to vote on what laws are just, as hopefully most people won't narc out on people breaking bad laws. I'd probably rather have more "citizen's arrests" (moderated by police) and less direct police arrests personally.

Also, by having access to the CCTV content, people might even catch particularly clumsy police committing crimes and getting them arrested, which would be awesome. I'm not from Britain though.

Well, they would just need enough e-readers to meet demand. The only time that would match every book they would normally have is if the library was completely checked out of books, and each person only checked out one book.

Once the tech gets better, I'd imagine this would make it easier for libraries to have better selection and make logistics a whole lot easier for them. Over the long term, it might even save costs if e-books get cheap enough.

That's classified. As long as you're not a thief (andwedontfuckup), you have nothing to worry about.

Read the thread directly above yours.

Pirate the songs, and anonymously send money to the band.

The second part might be tough though ;)

I now what you mean. I use Google Search and Gmail, but Google Desktop was a bit much for me. I think the problem is that it was too good. I didn't use it much so my paranoia outweighed the convenience.

if (enjoyProduct && site == "Slashdot")
{
if (productCompany == "Microsoft")
astroTurfer[poster] == true;
else
astroTurfer[poster] == false;
}
I did (tried to do) that in C# so I'm astroturfing as well.

Apple is still taking an unfair advantage, and IMO even without a monopoly this is still bad. Goes to show that the top management at Apple runs exactly like MS in a lot of ways, they just don't have the OS monopoly to take advantage of.

You can see it with the iPod; there's a lot of stuff that's proprietary that could have been standard, especially when it comes to docking stations that only work on iPod. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but docking stations that can use both the iPod and other MP3 players need to have a separate port for both? That's the vibe I get from this article (admittedly from an MS affiliated site).

For anyone who is seriously cancelling their account (not necessarily the parent):

Seriously? You hate MS that much? Yahoo accounts are more for other features and less for search anyway. Well whatever, if you're going to do it, do it quickly so they'll know the spike in cancellations is due to this. I guess the overall goal is that no other company will ever deal with MS again for fear of losing all their users over it. Even if it's the only way they can be competitive in a field.

Seriously?