Sorry, so sharing cam versions online doesn't hurt movie sales - and nobody said they did? That's a strawman?

That doesn't really go along with the facts: there's ridiculous measures to prevent cams at many theaters, new laws were put in place in many jurisdictions, and draconian enforcement has literally jailed people for things like "taking a picture of a friend, at a movie with the screen in the background".

You may have known this coming in, but it's certainly not just strawmen holding the position that online cam versions hurt sales.

Well, it's not just how they sell their products, it's the laws and prosecution they want to support that model. I'd suggest that the severe enforcement actions they demand (and usually get), have a negative impact on society and are also unnecessary for them to exist and profit (even without changing their business model) - and I believe that last part is the main point of this Slashdot article.

I think eventually these businesses will shift to models that don't require this kind of enforcement, that provide a better product to more people, and with better margins - and that not much time will be spent worrying about piracy because it won't be a significant problem to people. In the meantime, I think laws should be much more in favor of consumers: penalties should be smaller and rights to privacy should be preserved. These companies do not need legal protection that is draconian, and that extends well beyond the protection others get for their physical property.

You assume that board members can be fired,

Sorry, I wasn't perfectly clear. The ones proposing this at the board meeting would normally be execs, who could be fired.

What if that "one solitary idiot" is the single largest shareholder (directly representing himself)?

Somebody whistle-blows this (one or more of the original scientists, some middle manager, an executive, or a board member) and gets themselves a tidy book deal and is the hero who fought back to cure cancer. But even that's unlikely to be necessary - again, we're imagining human behavior that's very rare, and even more rare for someone who's very successful. Even if someone privately thought this would be profitable to bury (which it almost certainly wouldn't be), they'd have to be non-functionally psychopathic to actually suggest it out loud.

Look, I fully agree corporations (and people in general) do bad things. You can get a weird group-think going where everyone does something that nobody individually would do. Humans can do all sorts of bad things when they're scared. Many times you can get a horrible result through a chain of events that are all, themselves, reasonably innocuous. People will go a long ways to rationalize their own failures. Few people respect the categorical imperative; they'll do things that contribute to problems while denying their own responsibility or moral failure.

There's lots of mechanisms that result in bad behavior - but almost all of them share some characteristics; in very few do the functional people involved feel like they're actually doing something importantly wrong. In the case of a "burying the cure for cancer", that's a very hard leap to make, and suppressing a cure over time is going to take a large number of those leaps by a lot of people (and many of these steps don't make any business sense, let alone moral sense).

This kind of thinking is fantastically disconnected from reality - naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking. Big pharma execs would do anything for a cancer cure; it would mean fame, money, and prestige out their eyes. And if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job and be a funny story in someone's memoirs.

Now sure, they'd do what they could to milk it for profits - but they'd be damn sure it got out there before anyone else could. Hell, even if releasing it wasn't profitable at all (and it would be - obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously), they'd burn their company down if they had to.

Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation, and getting a whole raft of them together would be nigh impossible. Imagining collusion across all the companies on something like this is ridiculous.

Thing is, capitalism wasn't "designed" to distribute wealth.

Agree. But when the economy is heavily "people churning out stuff", capitalism distributes wealth pretty reasonably as kind of a side effect. Most people can create a reasonable amount of value, enough to support themselves as well as a surplus that creates employment opportunities.

I agree that there's a strong positive-feedback cycle in multi-generational capitalism, but that's much more manageable than the collapse that's coming when a large percentage of people have nothing to offer the economy.

I agree in large part, and RIM could have outs. If I was RIM, I'd focus on their advantages in hardware (good battery life, good reception, good keyboards, that little light when you have an e-mail) and corporate integration. If they were doing that, I'd have a lot more faith in their prospects. I think that market is solid, and may actually rebuild as people get tired of unreliable (by comparison) iPhones and cheap Androids.

This, though, seems like a too-late, too-fast, too-big move into app-phones - and I think they're going to bungle it like the bungled the Playbook, and the fail will taint their other products.

Honestly, I wish them all the best. It's a cool idea, and I don't have any real love for the other mobile platforms (I carry an ancient Nokia). I just don't think they'll pull it off great, and I don't think the market will have much patience for even small failures in the new product.

The only reason they're selling a few million is because they used to be selling many millions. On their current course (which they seem to be accelerating on), they soon won't be a small player, they'll be non-existent. As the parent poster suggests, at that point the random shareholders lose everything and anything of value they've made will be lost. If they sell now, it means the random investors get something out, and the things of value they've created will be more likely to be preserved. It also means some executives have to swallow some pride and find a new job, so it won't happen.

If products were made, marketed and sold locally, the distribution of wealth wouldn't be so skewed.

For most of history, this was the case. Almost everything people used was made within a few mile radius (often by themselves). I don't think you want to live in "most of history". Tremendous specialization of labor and mass production are what created modern civilization, and neither of those ideas work without large distribution networks.

Distribution of wealth is a growing problem because individual humans are worth less and less to the economy. The economy used to need more people for all sorts of things. Now it needs less. Eventually it will need very few. People will cling to capitalism long after it has ceased to be an effective way to distribute wealth.

They don't think "Great programmers write the fastest code". Good programmers do tend to produce faster code, not usually by optimizing and instruction shaving (which they rail against) but by writing algorithms with lower asymptotic bounds. Many applications have performance concerns, and understanding algorithm performance (and how to improve it) is something I'd expect from a good programmer. Obviously it's a mistake to attempt certain kinds of optimization, but "fastest code" is often a legitimate target - and good programmers will tend towards writing much faster code than bad programmers.

They don't think that "Good code is 'simple' or 'elegant'", and then they complain about "clever" code that developers have to puzzle over to understand. That doesn't sound like simple or elegant code to me. Yes, if you redefine "simple" as "shortest" I suppose I agree with them - but that's just not what simple means. There are many times when a problem has a simple solution and a complex one. It's usually right to pick the simple one. Sure it's possible to have code that's too clever, just as it's possible (and more usual) to have code that's not clever enough, but that's a separate issue. Simple and elegant are both usually good things to aim for.

OK, got it. If a newspaper does something bad, it's not really a newspaper - it's an advocacy site or a right-wing tabloid.

So these PR people can feel free to answer quickly to newspapers, they just have to be careful about tabloids, magazines, periodicals, rogue reporters, and temporary lapses in judgement that are not indicative of a paper's overall quality.

Or, they could assume the worst of all media, just as so many journalists are trained to assume anyone they interview are lying liars telling lies.

"Let me read my notes back to you to make sure I'm getting you right."

Lol. Do you read the papers? Most reporters today aren't in the business of making sure they get the right quote. They're in the business of waiting for a mistake (or an isolated sentence or phrase that could be construed as one) - and, if they get one, putting it as a headline and milking it for all it's worth. The current Republican primary has turned on stupid phrases; the Alberta election coverage (I live in Alberta) has orbited around them as well. It hasn't given many journalists pause as to whether those quotes represent what those candidates think or feel - they've scored their points and made their splash.

If you can't imagine a journalist salivating about the prospect of reporting "government boondoggle spends x million dollars finding out it's snowing", then you just aren't paying attention. This isn't partisan, this isn't a bureaucratic problem, it's a problem with the perverse relationship that journalists now have with the public. They have tremendous pressure to be permanently adversarial to everyone - many seem to believe that's somehow what journalism is about - and it means that people are loath to be candid or off-the-cuff with any media.

These bureaucrats spending some time to avoid a trumped-up scandal probably saves the government a lot of time and money.