I said a living wage, not $15/hr, and none of that excuses the treatment of these people. Even if Apple wants to stick with China and Foxconn, these workers could be paid enough that they could actually afford to live outside the factory, and given enough respect that the concept of dragging them out of bed to fix some dipshit in Cupertino's high paid mistake and bragging about it wouldn't happen.

Apple makes more than enough profit to make these devices in the US and actually help grow the US economy instead of dodging taxes and shipping jobs overseas, but even if they won't do that, they could at least give their contractors a little human dignity.

The problem with lawyers is that the law seems to be a combination of being "correct" and/or "convincing" rather than right. This tends to lead even the more honorable lawyers down a rather crooked path as the means they have to use to deliver a just outcome are not exactly ethical if that makes any sense. The law is about technicalities when dealing with judges and charisma with juries.

I've long believed that laws should be written as a statement of intent combined with a reason for their passage, which could then be more easily interpreted by judges. If the crime doesn't match the intent of the law, or further evidence shows that the reason isn't correct we can toss out cases and/or laws and our justice system could get back to being about right and wrong again. You'd obviously need some traditional pieces to deal with penalties and the like, but can you imagine a world where congress had to spell out both the intent of a law and its reasoning. No more loopholes, no more using laws designed for one thing being abused for another(generally at the expense of the little guy).

Pretty much anyone could give a reasonable verdict if they knew what they were actually deciding on.

Which is a bit of a stupid tactic given that the first strike in any war with Iran will come from Israel which doesn't care about civilian population or foreign nationals when it comes to this sort of thing. The US(and most of the rest of the world) will end up involved partially due to treaties, but mostly in a potentially vain effort to try and mitigate the damage. No one will win a war with Iran, not Israel, not Iran, not the US, everyone will lose. In all likelihood the folks in the Middle East will lose in a more direct way than countries a bit further away, but it won't be good for anyone.

It seems likely that there won't be enough hawkish lunatics in congress to push this through from the US end(and neither Romney nor Obama appear insane enough), so it'll most likely be an Israeli strike that starts the whole thing off.

What doesn't add up is actually really really simple to understand.

If you fund your project through industry connections, those industry connections actually expect you to provide them with some kind of financial return. If you get your project funded by kick starter all you have to do is send them some merchandise which costs you virtually nothing. This goes doubly so if you're nominally famous in geek circles or attached to something which is nominally famous in geek circles. If they can get this thing off the ground and it does even moderately well at the box office that's 100 grand they don't have to do anything for.

I'm just waiting for the first bright spark to work out they don't even actually have to have a project to run a kick starter project. You could get someone like Summer Glau starting up a project to product signed pictures of herself and geeks would line up around the block donating to fund it, keep the reward brackets right and you could walk away with a tidy profit.

It exists, well sort of.

There exist in every society a small number of people who get offended by pretty much everything. They attack anyone who violates their version of the norms of society, and they tend to write an awful lot of letters. They are however, for the most part, just sad pathetic individuals with a form of personality disorder, the actual societal framework they supposedly follow is for the most part immaterial, they just like moral outrage. Some get upset when a woman wears a short skirt, some when something is "politically incorrect". They're really just the left and right leaning versions of example the same noxious person. That doesn't mean that these people are never right, just that whether they're right or not isn't actually important to them. Some "politically incorrect" phrases are actually particularly offensive, some have consequences in terms of thought patterns(disabled people vs people with disabilities for example), and some are just nitpicking, the letter writers don't care. The problem comes in that a lot of letters from a very small number of people can have a disproportionate impact, which is offensive no matter who is doing the writing and no matter the cause they believe in.

About 80% of the price of an iPhone, even in the US where they're cheaper than most places, is pure profit for Apple. That's not 20% of the cost to manufacturing it's 20% of the cost to manufacture, package, market, ship, and sell. Apple can afford to pay living wages(or at least treat their employees like human beings instead of slaves) and still make a healthy profit.

Unfortunately somewhere in the last couple of hundred years we've lost our moral compass when it comes to money. At present we seem to live in a society where if it's not illegal then it's just fine to do it whatever the costs or consequences and if it is illegal you buy off some politicians to change the law.

This is why we need so much legislation these days because business seems to have become incapable of making moral decisions, if we don't outlaw it and require them to fill in huge amounts of wasteful paperwork to prove they aren't doing it, they'll continue to do it.

Apple is a purely immoral company, in every possible way. They pay the people who make their stuff nothing and those people are treated like something less than human(I'm not talking about any of the accidents, I'm talking about the story straight from an Apple exec of waking the entire factory crew up in the middle of the night to redo the iPad screens). On the other end they gouge consumers and restrict their freedom above and beyond what is justifiable. All in the name of profit at any consequence, and it's become rampant in our society. Society will not survive this continued concentration of all wealth into the hands of a small minority.

Very few artists ever made a living selling music because even if the entire album cost was pure profit for the artist you'd still need to be selling 2000 a year to make a 30 grand a year, which isn't exactly rolling in cash, and that's in a dream world where you have no costs and can sell at $15 per album(which as a no name band you can't). Add to that the fact that unless you're producing an album a year which is fairly uncommon, you're looking at increasing that basic fan base by an proportional factor.

In reality you might sell your album for $10 on iTunes, you'd probably produce an album about once every 3 years, Apple would take 30% of that and probably at least half the rest of it would go into production costs. Leaving you with 3.50 per album and requiring you to have a fan base of 30,000 just to eat and pay your rent.

Getting 30,000 people who will buy your album is hard, and given the way that popularity tends to snowball, if you can get 30,000 people to buy your album you can probably get 100,000 to buy your album or even substantially more.

The big difference between the old system and the new system is that in the old system the record company took all the risk. A shitty band who got signed would get paid even if their album did incredibly poorly, which is why the RIAA takes such a big cut.

They aren't really. They're selling stock in the next X records they make where X is the number defined in the contract they sign.

Alternatively, if you got a million dollar loan from the Bank(even if they would give it to you) and then your business failed you'd still be on the hook for a million dollars. If you signed to a record label and your record failed they still pay you.

The Dutch(and for that matter British) East India companies were not the norm, nor were they anything like current multinationals.

They might have operated in multiple nations, but they were controlled, legislated, and taxed solely in their country of origin. They were also both crown monopolies with the full weight of their respective governments up to and including the armed forces behind them. There were no questions about where the Dutch East India company was legislated from or to whom it would pay taxes. These companies operated within their home country, in other countries on terms largely determined by treaty, and in countries their respective governments didn't really believe were actually countries.

Not really a meaningful result.

For one thing, security in Firefox is a heap of crap and always has been. The browser is excessively paranoid, which is great I install stuff which makes my Firefox is even more paranoid. The difficulty however is that it's very difficult to mark content as trusted. Zones are one of the few things that IE has always had right in terms of security(possibly the only thing), to perform the same thing in Firefox you have to edit a config file and manually grant the specified permission to a site which is just moronic.

For another, it's about the purpose of the site. Sharing your search results with others without your consent or knowledge would be evil, sharing them because that's what you wanted it to do is not. Firefox is, as per usual, detecting a potential security threat correctly but not allowing the user to respond correctly. Using So.cl involves opting into a sharing situation that in another circumstance would be an indication of massive malware.

The commerce clause isn't "anything you want it to be", it's just a massively powerful constitutional clause. Perhaps one which the founders didn't anticipate being massively powerful, but one that was written that way none the less

When the founders wrote the constitution, the US was, for all intents and purposes a federation of states, largely speaking the states were independent and the federal government was essentially the arbiter of disagreements between them. That was fine and dandy back then because that's how things actually were, there were very few multinational or even interstate corporations in existence and to most people the neighboring state may as well have been make believe because they'd never see it.

The world has changed, interstate companies and even international companies are now the norm. Pretty much every commercial transaction you take part in is interstate, and so the commerce clause applies to pretty much everything you do.

It's sort of one of those problems facing most federations(including the EU for all that it was formed in the last few decades). The model works great when states are largely independent, but it falls down very quickly when they're not as you end up in this situation whereby either the arbitration powers of the federal government become all encompassing or the federal government can't do its job due to extensive restrictions. In reality it's probably time for a lot of countries to take a fresh look at their constitutions and make a judgement as to what should actually be the domain of the states and how exactly that's all going to work now that states aren't, for all intents and purposes, independent countries. How do you regulate Goldman Sachs? Which state or local government controls them? Do we regulate them where their corporate office is(City of New York)? Where the client lives? Where the transaction took place? Which level of government is closes to Goldman Sachs? To the Mississippi River? To Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or your bank? Perhaps unfortunately there is very little that can still be effectively regulated by the states, let alone local government.

That's not to say the court isn't corrupt and partial(though I'd suggest that has more to do with the process of picking judges than anything else, Supreme Court appointments are not based on merit, but on politics, so unsurprisingly Supreme Court Justices are political creatures), but the explosion of the commerce clause isn't really a result of that.

I agree with you there(though I probably have a different solution), but the point of it is that this case is a bit of a long shot even if you had a very different supreme court than we currently do.

That said, as I've stated, it's a long shot with pretty much no down side for the people involved. Arguing in front of the SC is a career win for the lawyers and even if they came back with some massively pro copyright ruling it wouldn't increase the fine. We could potentially end up with such a ruling which would hurt everyone else, but it wouldn't make this individual's situation any worse.

No he said DNF was released, which was one of the first signs of the end of the world. The final sign was the release of Enlightenment DR17, which has been in development since 2000 and will probably still be in development until long after I am dead. It's one of those projects where the developers are striving for an impossible degree of perfection and so never actually finish. It's not been quite as long as GNU Hurd, but E16 was a damned fantastic window manager(a bit out of date now) whereas GNU Hurd is a kernel no one cares about except RMS.

That's not entirely a fair statement. Most companies are founded by people with knowledge or skills specific to the companies core product so generally speaking the first outside person they hire is going to be someone who has skills they don't have, a lot of times that's going to be someone in admin as opposed to a lawyer, but I'd be seriously surprised to find many software companies whose first employee was a developer.