The military metaphors can also get a company into legal trouble, even in the US. There is one well-publicized case where company strategies with cool names like 'Death Star' are paving the way to realtime in club fed.

I suspect that many executives are shocked, I mean *shocked* to hear that the strategies they got from a management book that they found at Borders, a book with stylish references to Sun Tzu, this book has strategies that are downright illegal! I'm shocked, your honor, it should be illegal to print such things.

I agree, greenFox, as programmers we don't need to think or work in the military context, and we would be better off to use a different metaphor.

Make love not war!

Update Hmm.. I tried responding to the node below maybe I screwed up or perhaps it was reaped. Anyway, the idea is that when you get in trouble for something, such as Enron did after they stole billions of dollars from California, it turns out that your state of mind when you did the crime makes a big difference. When you use cool names like 'Death Star' for your strategy (which was used in California and Oregon, not offshore), it is more difficult to claim that you didn't mean any harm. It is the difference between a simple misunderstanding, fraud, and racketeering.

Some energy lobbyists still claim that the 'Death Star' strategy is legal, but they never refer to it by the 'Death Star' name, because it would be a poor legal strategy to do so.

There are numerous articles that you can find on yahoo that explain the strategies and the legal arguments in this case.

I suppose that if you aren't concerned that anything that you ever do will be questioned legally, you don't need to worry about what you call things. As a book author, you would be in good shape.

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