... stop selling a product because it was dangerous

You say that as if he were selling fireworks, caustic cleaning supplies, or surplus hand grenades.

He complied, labeling the product as not for children, and not for ingestion. The same kind of warnings that show up on fireworks *and* caustic cleaning supplies. I don't believe hand grenades have the same warning on them.

Well it seems that there is a warning on smoke greandes"DANGER-DO NOT USE HC IN CONFINED OR ENCLOSED AREAS- PERSONNEL MUST WEAR THE PROTECTIVE MASK IN ANY CONCENTRATION OF HC SMOKE" It doesn't say you can't feed it to children though.

Next time you hear about a child getting hurt with a firework, household cleaning supplies, or falling off a bicycle, be sure to remind them to sue the CEO for selling dangerous items. Don't forget to sue the CEO of every company along the entire distribution chain too.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but a citation helps.

The mutually assured destruction idea from the Cold War almost became a reality multiple times do to various "oopses" during that period. It was largely because of a discomforting amount of dumb luck that it didn't end really really badly.

Even if that were the case, why must it be our job to fix it? We're war-weary because of trying to fix too many of the world's problems to begin with. Or, more accurately, pretending to fix the world's problems in order to ensure a complex web of international relations stays on track to keep the US economy humming along.

A government is meant to be concerned with the citizens of their governed. A dictator from another country gassing his own people should not be its concern.

    I happen to be allergic to something that someone wears or uses at work. Last week, I had to spend some time outside, because they walked by my office, and I started sneezing constantly.

    I have no idea who it is, or what it is. Since it doesn't last all day, I assume it's someone reapplying their stink.

    I mentioned it in conversation with one of the executive's assistants. Well, because I was sitting outside sounding like I had a nasty cold that cleared up in about 15 minutes. They told me all I had to do was complain and they'd reinforce the policy against perfumes. I told them I won't complain, and would address it with the person directly if I ever find who it is.

    I was already able to definitely track one stink. It was room air freshener that someone used. I had suspicions. It was confirmed when I walked back into my office and started sneezing just a couple minutes after they had sprayed it. They still use it, but sparingly, and that doesn't make me sneeze. Problem solved. No official paperwork, and no hard feelings. :)

I've stopped listening to radio stations specifically for that reason. One had an ad that they played about every 15 minutes, with an ambulance siren. So during the evening commute, I could hear it about 8 times.

I don't know if they still play that ad. It's better that I listen to something else (or nothing at all), than rescan the environment for an emergency vehicle that isn't there.

WELL, THERE GOES MY CREDIT SCORE.

    FUNNY, MANY CREDIT REPORTS ARE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. POT. KETTLE.

    THE FOURTH AGAINST THE WALL AFTER THE REVOLUTION WILL BE THE CREDIT BUREAU EXECUTIVES. THE FIRST THREE WILL BE MARKETING EXECUTIVES FROM SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION, LAWYERS AND POLITICIANS.

    Damn. The all caps are hurting my brain.

    And it tripped the filters.
---
  Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

    That would be an act of war. At least it could be perceived as such by the US.

    The UN already has four major offices. Geneva, Nairobi, New York, and Vienna. I believe all have facilities sufficient to hold the general assemblies. If not, I'm sure there are a whole bunch of nations willing to hand over complexes of sufficient size to do it.

    The hardest part would be telling all those ambassadors and support staff that they no longer live and work at the UN in New York. It's not impossible, just difficult logistically. It could take weeks if they set a *very* ambitious schedule.

  One of the questions is, what would the US response be? They could detain, or at least delay, the departure of the ambassadors and staff. Sure it'd be totally illegal and against the spirit of International cooperation. That doesn't mean it wouldn't happen.

You would completely erase all your work by just eating 5 cookies, or drinking 2 bottles of Gatorade

Yeah, any population that considers 5 cookies or 2 bottles of Gatorade to be an insignificant amount of food is going to have a weight problem. Just the thought of that much in addition to my normal diet over the course of a day makes me slightly ill.

There are limits to it... Say American applicants were only willing to do the job for $1M/yr, but they can farm it out to a foreign worker for $10K/yr, and the company budget is up to $50K/yr.

I know it's the argument that they claim, yet screw American employees. Hi, I am one.

I worked for 8 years at job where I was making about $125K/yr (including benefits). The job given to a foreign company for $50K/yr. I wasn't offered to take a pay cut, or any other type of negotiation. I just found myself locked out of the servers, and it took them a full day to let me know I wasn't employed any more.

My ex-employer suffered because of it. The outsourced company convinced them that they should be paranoid of me. Every bit of running code, from crons, to public facing interfaces, was rewritten at a cost of over $250K in 6 months. They spent a lot of time hunting for back doors that I simply had never left. I consider back doors a security risk. It's better to focus on keeping the front door secure.

The servers were systematically wiped and replaced (swapping Linux for *BSD). The outsourced company didn't understand the kind of loads my servers were tuned for. On commodity hardware, we could saturate several GigE circuits on any day of the week, and it was redundant enough to take multiple servers or even an entire site outage.

Over the next year, I was told by employees and others associated with the company, about constant failures. The primary revenue sites would go down on a regular basis, because they couldn't tune them properly. When they did operate, they were slow. They did purchase networking hardware I had been fighting for, but they failed to configure them properly either. I suspect the redundancy I had outlined wasn't done, but I don't have any further information on that. They didn't want to reference anything I had done, including 8 years of tuning and analysis of technical requirements.

All in all, from what I've been told by those who are still privileged to information, is that their revenue dropped by millions of dollars.

I don't know if they're still using the other company. I know there was a big fight between the owners, and they parted ways. I'd suspect it wasn't over creative control. Most likely they were seriously impacted by the loss of revenue, and anything could have instigated the split.

They saved about $75K/yr. They lost so much more. There were implications that I might do something to hurt them. I didn't have to, they screwed it up all on their own.

All of my work was well documented. Since the beginning, a copy of the passwords were kept with the owners. In my opinion, it's their company, and they can screw it up any way they want. It just sucks I lost a good job, so a foreign based company could make a little bit more. It sucks for my old company too, as they lost their asses because of it.

From what I read of it, he was talking about his personal feelings and opinions.

I could see if it were a site that he put video of his own suicide on, or other graphic depictions, there would be a reason to remove it. In this case, there was none. It was left as his legacy, or at least for the 5 years he paid for.

There was no good justification in taking it down, except possibly that it took too much traffic. If it were a small hosting company, and had a negative impact on services to other customers, I could see it. Yahoo has enough resources to continue supporting that site for the full term as paid for.

Sure, but we have much better understanding regarding how the laws of motion work than the mechanics of consciousness, which isn't much better than hand-waving in comparison. To have a detailed model work in several instances, and have the same results due to a different mechanism in others would be a much less believable coincidence than with consciousness.

The laws of motion are also very good in that it is a very simple model that can be extended to describe seemingly complicated phenomenon. Consciousness at this point seems complicated and is not well understood. It would be much simpler, in some sense, to assume that everyone else is a philosophical zombie without having to appeal to the idea of consciousness. In another sense, they look/behave just the same as me, so why me and not them?

I think one of the big questions about consciousness is in what sense it is "real", besides the subjective experience. (Or the ability to have a subjective experience). What are the essential qualities needed for such an emergent process to exist?

There are some non-junk non-New Agey type theories about the universe in some sense being conscious (labeled Panpsychism), though I don't buy into them personally. The argument is that all objects have some level of consciousness, some more than others due to some kind of emergence from complexity. But, again, what the exact conditions these are that increase the level of consciousness is the big question.

But we've confirmed that the laws of motion apply to every planetary body we've bothered to test against them. It started with the moon*, where Newton used his newly-invented calculus to verify that the its motion would match the predictions of his theory.

That anyone else besides myself is conscious is an assumption, albeit a reasonable one.

*Yeah, not a "planetary body", but still applies.

Yeah, pretty much.