Your analogy is close, but in the case of P2P, most of their use is for illegal things.

So it's more like suing Ford over a car they sold which included features like secret compartments (that criminals use to hide drugs), a giant bull bar (which they advertise as being able to run over a person with no damage to the car), and is advertised as being completely bulletproof, with holes for you to shoot out of.

Sure, it could still be end with them being ruled in favour, but it's not quite as clear cut as you make it out with your example.

Or the fact that games like Counter Strike 1.6 or Starcraft: Brood War still have some of the biggest professional leagues in history despite sequels being out.

Money is still being poured into those leagues.

I know someone who works in Enterprise Architecture/IT strategy and has done consulting work for both private and public sectors.

He said that when he worked for an Australia government organisation, the general work culture all the way from the bottom IT workers to the senior management was one of mediocrity and barely any emphasis placed on performance. As long as workers fill their most basic contract requirements, everyone is happy - even if they're incompetent.

Apparently the CIO himself admitted that some of his senior management staff were useless and incompetent but didn't want to replace them simply because they had worked in the organisation for years.

You wouldn't see that in the private sector at all. And I guess the argument here would be that external IT contractors would have a similar work ethic. I'd argue it'd be more of management itself that needs to be replaced, as opposed to the lower level contractors.

Some people get scared when they see this plastered all over the news and they stop.

Then over the next year, they watch as their mates continue to download with no reprisals, and eventually start doing it again.

Considering that Facebook probably has a market share Redhat can even dream of - and not just the 'damn teeny boppers' as you said, but just about every demographic there is - I'd say people do give a fuck.

If Apple disappeared a lot of people would lose their jobs, dropping retail spending, investment, and increasing expenditure on social services. The result would make the GFC look like a small market correction. It would also cause hurt future speculation into tech companies and probably slow the growth of IT and technology industries by 5-10 years *after* the recession has finished. Kind of like what happened in the dot com crash.

It's not really a fair comparison since well, if Apple never existed, it's market would probably belong to another company. And maybe smartphones would only be starting to move into the hands of people (instead of being the standard). And if Exxon never existed, it's wells would be owned by another company. If you're saying say, Apple goes bankrupt - as you said, other competitors would take over. Same thing would happen with Exxon - their wells would be sold to other companies.

Exxon may be providing a more critical service, but they're not indispensable.

God, I don't think I've ever been so damned annoyed at Slashdot as I was reading these comments.

Everyone who is going on about how HFT traders are evil, and not benefiting anyone, or not benefiting society - I really think you should shut the fuck up.

How many of you are working for the pure purposes of 'bettering humanity' and 'feeding the poor'. I imagine very few. You're working to make money.

HFTers doesn't hurt the market as much as people seem to be claiming. I imagine it barely affects any of *you* either. If you're investing long term, then the stock will move based on fundamentals. HFT only really affect stuff in short-medium term.

So one HFT company wants to make money, they develop an algorithm to be better than the other HFT company. They're competing with *each other*.

So all your retards who are saying "HFTers should be shot" - well, I wonder what your programming skills are being used for? Maybe a volunteer project for charity? If so, good on you. But I'd be willing to bet most of you hypocrites are programming for your companies to make them more money.

Or they just claim it from their insurance companies?

That's what the government is for. They're meant to step in and stop corporations from doing immoral things.

The job of the corporations and the people that run them is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.

Supposedly with the two groups doing their job, things will go well. Unfortunately, one group is doing their job too well and the other, barely at all.

How about the company FUND an MBA for an engineer when he moves to a senior position?

I know some companies do this. So he has engineering background, and an MBA for his new role. Best of both worlds?

True.

I guess it's the difference between two people doing the same degree, and one of them loves reading up more on wikipedia and whatnot, while the other just concentrates on studying. The person who loves to be there to learn, and the person who is learning to get a good job.

The interesting thing is, the marks don't always reflect who is the more 'intellectual' person.

I think a lot of people simply call people who are antisocial geeks/nerds.

Obviously, that doesn't make them intellectual. Many of them will sit there raging at people in video games, or troll 4chan all day long.

A friend of mine had an issue with FedEx. He was ordering tires from TireRack in the US and getting them shipped to Australia.

However, all the drivers they use here locally are all private couriers - not directly employed with FedEx.

When the package changed its status to 'delivered', but with a completely different address in a completely different suburb, my mate got a bit worried and called up FedEx, who told them that they didn't have the contact details for the driver. Rather, he contacted *them* and they had to wait for him to come to pick up his next batch of deliveries.

Luckily ends up it was a mistake - he delivered it to the wrong place, and they called up FedEx to return it.

But still, I mean when you ship by a big company like FedEx you kinda assume they'd be using their own, well trained drivers with a bunch of good procedures in place to immediately work out what went wrong. Not private couriers they don't even have a contact number for.

That's the problem. It should be a reasonable expectations to expect any large company like that to have adequate security measured protecting customer data. The fact that they haven't should be a big issue with them specifically. I dunno how you can say people are blind for trusting them - or any other major company - in the first place though.

With an attitude like that, I assume you don't buy much stuff online.

At this stage, we should be able to trust internet security for major corporations to protect our data. What happens if PayPal gets hacked? "When will people stop trusting the intertubes security implicitly"?

I think its a rather reasonable expectations to expect a company like Sony to protect its user information.