Isn't it a step in the right direction? At least the material is being used twice before becoming waste. I don't think anyone expects it to replace gasoline but it give more options, alleviating dependence on any one source for energy.

wait for it....wait for it....

It seems that Desmond Tutu and Putin went to analogy school together.

No, no clue what that was supposed to mean. Guessing, I would say that it refers to either the hypocrisy of arresting someone for charges (we assume) are false to avoid arresting him (illegally) for what they want to arrest him for, or a kind of "taste of your own medicine" type thing; as in the US makes a lot of noise about the bad stuff others do but hey look you guys do it too with a hockey playing cow.

reading that again it sounds like flamebait, sorry. What I mean is that the internet is an international phenomenon and while Canada or Nicaragua or whoever can decide whatever they want, most web sites and or businesses on the web are not fixed to a physical location. It's like raising corporate taxes. Companies will just go elsewhere or declare that they are doing X thing elsewhere where it is legal/cheaper.

what Canada decides?

I think everyone here is being very short sighted with your concepts. Capitalism is an excellent way to distribute resources and organize groups of people when there is something new and needs new organization or distribution. It quickly becomes dominated by someone/business that must be broken down (ie trust busting or splitting the winner to maintain the useful competition that originally distributed the resource.) This is the role of gov't, or should be; regulate and protect the public because the natural end result of capitalism is to maximize profit which at some point will mean "take advange of little guy because we just can't reasonable be more efficient and we already killed the competition." What I am saying is that we should be looking for a cyclical phenomena. Capitalism sees this non-tangible thing/concept of IP and takes advantage. It created huge companies like MS. Google and Co. who in turn have thousands of employees who buy stuff and the system goes forward. This power has been concentrating since the IT bubble bust and now it is reaching the tipping point; something's gotta give. IV is an example of this. The exploitation must cycle again or a new thing will come up. It's like populism, a great concept but not complete. Populism wants the best for those who have the least. If it succeeds it destroys itself and there must be a plan for what we do when "now those who had the least have more." Capitalism is the same, it does one thing really well but there must a next step for when it finishes distributing.

I totally agree. It is all about how you plan to make money (read business model). These intellectual assets are fundamentally different things from traditional assets and if you treat then like a car or some other physical thing you are going to have problems. Our current problems with patents/copyright/etc is a phenomena of this kind of thinking. We are trying to put the square peg in the round hole; intellectual/electronic/artistic things are fundamentally different from other things. Look at Red Hat, instead of trying to sell a "thing" they let the thing/asset/linux create a pull for their services. They maintain the thing and support the thing but it is not theirs. That is how they make money with the asset. Just as parent says, they have moved on to a a consultative / training / services based business structure.

who cares? The point is that it is open. Today paid programmers are doing, before nerdy basement dwellers did it, maybe tomorrow homosexual vampires will do it. Being open allows the "who" to change.

Not exactly. I assume they already provide uniforms and all other effects (back braces, etc) for the workers. I guess I am trying to say that they should get the "right" things for the employees. The right things should only be a little more expensive than what they are using right now. But, responding directly to your comment: each employee must process X number of packages to be beneficial to the company. Multiply that number by the "useful life" of said equipment and divide by the price if the equipment. If you work from that concept, it does not matter how many employees you have. You just have to ask if that cost per package is worth it to have better service or be able to demand better work from your employees considering you are providing the needed equipment.

I whole heartedly agree with your argument except for the last part. A medical journal with the word "Daily" in its name is bound to be sensational or ignorant. While things move fast in medicine, our understanding of how and why stuff works does not. Meaningful studies almost always take years or even decades to do and then sometimes you don't even know how you screwed it up until your done and you have to start again, from zero.

Sounds like an excuse to me. In stead of taking it out on the packages, couldn't you request better work conditions? Glove, a jacket, portable heater? Divide that cost by the thousands of packages you handle per day and I don't think it would represent a price change. Every job has parts that you don't like, they wouldn't pay you if someone would do it for free.

right, your Angelfire web site in the middle of the night. (a light fappish sound in background)