Only in America would someone who drives 20 miles a day consider himself to be someone who doesn't use roads much.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm just amazed at the differences in the way people see the world.
Perhaps that's because it's a different world they are seeing? *I* am amazed that everyone thinks the rest of the world is exactly like where they are, except the people are stupider.
Reality check: America is large. Many, many people live more than 20 miles away from where they work. (many!) A large percentage cannot live closer due to costs, another large percent due to "ick"-factors of city life (crime, pollution, lack of green space, etc), another large percent because they bought a permanent residence then switched jobs, etc. Most of the country also doesn't have adequate transportation infrastructure (no light rail, no commuter rail, little trans-continental rail).
So don't be too amazed at the differences in the way people see the world. You're better off being amazed at the actual different worlds people live in that drive how they see it.
I would also add that for certain religious groups, marijuana is a part of their spirituality. Same goes for peyote and various psylocibin producing mushrooms. Opiates, methamphetamines, and any synthetic drug I can think of only exist as profit/entertainment for people.
Well, you had better expand your list and your thought processes. It turns out there is a large subculture that finds spiritual uses for a variety of mind altering substances that are synthetically created.
MDMA easily comes to mind, LSD as well. DMT (the spirit molecule:P) more than passes. I'm sorry if you've never run into that subculture but that's life in the big world, but the list is relatively endless (See Shulgin, et. al. if you're interested for a small variety of two different branches of the spiritual pharmacopoeia (TIKAL, PHIKAL) ).
You don't get to decide what (drug/practice/etc.) has a spiritual component, especially when it comes to an individual's right to alter their own consciousness. Hope that helps.
How would you like it if you were a musician, and I started bootlegging every single last piece of merchandise that you every produced and gave it away for free or at just cost? Your t-shirts, your stickers, your cds, everything. Oh, and I stood there recording every live performance in high quality HD and gave it away for free to anyone too lazy or cheap to go to your show?
Sounds like the Grateful Dead, to me...
They didn't seem to have any problem with your supposed ISSUES!
Well, perhaps you should pay attention to what you post, then.
My statements are a rebuttal of the assertions you made.
Since you are being either an asshat or a pendant, let me reiterate the whole convo I replied to below:
When left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer
That would be dumb of them. Don't those employees have any interest in keeping their jobs and putting food on the table? How can they stay in business if they screw over their customers. What stops a customer from switching to another service provider?
and the consumer who has virtually no individual power
Their wallets are all the power they need. Don't like a company? Pick another? If another doesn't exist, persuade everyone you know to demand better service and another company will come along to provide that service (if the demand is high enough, of course).
Now that we have that out of the way, perhaps you can tell me where you went wrong yourself? No?
Then let me.
The OP was stating that businesses will try to fuck the consumer.
You go and say Nyah, they won't!
I then joined in and said(colloquially); given the preponderance of evidence of past actions of businesses, it is relatively certain that, left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer.
Is that clear enough for you? You are wrong and refuse to acknowledge it. Well, that's ok, I speak truth to idiocy, too.
Second point.
You stated that all the protection from businesses consumers need comes from their wallets("Their wallets are all the power they need.")
I replied, in effect, that historically, this *is not* all the consumers need. The thinking persons follow on observation may be seen as - perhaps that's true today, too!
If my post conveyed a lack of information to you, the reason is you refuse to see the information contained therein.
I would have thought it perfectly clear that this is the issue.
We have a phenomenon. People are observing something. It doesn't make sense to a priori decide that what they are seeing is false or merely a product of their own minds.
Yet, this is exactly what science has turned in to. Your very post points this out in exquisite detail - I needn't even continue.
I wish there were ghosts too. And aliens. And psychics. It'd make the world a lot more interesting. But we're talking about reality here. Or so I assumed.
Yup, that's the problem. You ASSUME you know what reality is, and then go on to not even attempt to measure what you consider outside your reality - even when confronted with experiential evidence!
Perhaps it's a new transport mechanism, designed to compress, transport and unpack data objects(we can call them "clowns"). The cool thing would be that you get more data out during the unpack stage than you'd ever think would fit in so small a transport (we could call that a "car"!).
So... you're trying to say that Apple can't produce enough hardware if demand increased?
Hm. I wonder what evidence you have to back this up. I'm pretty sure I can find at least one model that isn't on backorder. My take is that they purposefully do not create large inventories of computers at launch. As far as Apple being able to scale - does the Ipod or Iphone mean anything to you? How many have they shipped?
So, in fact all we need is to enforce existing laws.
None of this "over the internet" means something else happened bullshit. It's quite similar to how we geeks decry patents where the only difference is "with a computer."
How hard is it do grasp that? The woman abused a child. Period. The woman should be punished. Period.
She is guilty. And the thing she's guilty of is actually illegal when she did it.
Just because someone is abused over a computer doesn't mean they are not abused. Child abuse is child abuse, whether "with a computer" or without one.
Geeks seem to have no problem seeing that when we are talking about patents. What is so hard about extending your thought processes to other situations?
Did she abuse the girl or did she not? The smart money is on the fact that she did.
Perhaps this isn't the law to punish her with (TOS non-compliance, psh!) but we certainly have one that does work. Let's use that one instead.
However, if I was starting a new small business, I believe I'd look at cutting cost as much as possible. You can get by with "even" a 486 unless your business needs number crunching powers. So, basically you can get free or near machines.
Now, to software licensing. It doesn't even remotely make sense to pay more for software than the hardware. And for almost all small businesses there are solutions that just work for the mission critical portions of the infrastructure (backup, website, even phones!).
There is really no "risk" for a small business to use the big open source packages. So they can't fix it themselves. So what. Did they think they were going to get MS (or whoever) to fix it for them (probably yes, but that just means they're delusional).
It just seems that the second round of computing went to lock-in solutions. Any business that grew up under these conditions might have a hell of a time extracting themselves, but you just have to ask - is survival worth it, or not?
I'd agree that most proprietary sw houses don't really know what it means to be a small business. I'd even argue that they don't really know what it means to be in business at all (hint - being a parasite is not a business opportunity).
Did Thomas Jefferson free all his slaves upon making that statement? No? Well, James Boyle freed his work by licensing it under the creative commons. Perfect.
Of course, it is always possible that they are just not living up to their end of the bargain.
I don't consider myself a loser in those cases. I consider the person who isn't living up to their end of the bargain the loser, even if I suffer and they do not.
I'll not go over the article, just what I consider misguided.
Complaint 1: package management
Seems the guy wants everyone to use a single package management system, so that all the proprietary commercial software folks can sell their apps more easily across multiple target systems. His complaint with letting the repositories take care of that is proprietary software vendors are left in the lurch. Well, this seems like a plus to me then. If they want to play, they should either eat the cost of managing their own software across multiple delivery platforms (e.g. rethat, ubuntu, suse, etc.) or open source their code.
Complaint 2: there are too many config files!
Uuunh. Ever seen the numbers of config files on other systems? Some places call it a "registry" if that helps any... Enough said.
Complaint 3: application binary interfaces are a moving target
Yes. This needs fixing. What needs to be fixed is this "want" - that is the basic dysfunction in this case. Either you want progress or you want a static abi. Simple as that. Which "want" do you cater to? I know which I'm going with.
Complaint 4: Audio interfaces
It seems there are too many audio interfaces for the author. After all, if you need JACK you should probably have a Mac as PulseAudio should be good enough for anyone./sarcasm
Complaint 5 GUIs should ultimately be the province of the kernel
I give you this quote:
To that end, what's needed is a single steering committee for all GUIs that work on Linux, so that whatever GUIs are created -- be they GNOME, KDE, or not-yet-invented -- will have a consistency of implementation on the backend, and make it possible to have tight integration of features with the kernel, a la BeOS. The kernel would publish a generic series of hooks that a GUI could make use of, and the GUI would be free to represent them to the user in any number of ways.
Which means that if the kernel doesn't present you with what you need, you're SOL. Or perhaps I am not reading that right but it seems that this would be much more of a clusterf*ck than the current path.
Most everything else he talks about are additional features that it would be nice for Linux to support; file versioning by default (would be cool, don't have it by default, that sucks), commercially hosted backup and restore (how is this a fault of Linux, again? - it seems more like a business opportunity to me), per application shutdown of X11 (actually a really great idea).
Not to disagree with you, but I do. *Shrug* Life's like that.
That would probably make you feel better, but a lot of these drones are restricted in what they're allowed to do and they're forced to go through standard scripts and procedures.
It is unfortunate that we as people put up with mindsets such as yours. Oh, wah - they aren't really real people so we should just shut up about it. Well, no. They *are* real people and if they fuck up they should know it. Yes, their actions are limited but within those bounds they can be just as much a good person or a dick as you or I.
And here is where you go off the deep end:
I'm sure that the supervisor appreciated some random asshole telling him how to do his job and manage his staff.
Well, yes. If he was a good supervisor. Who do you think is going to give him the most objective opinion on how his staff is helping people? Oh, I know! how about the people they are supposedly helping? I know it must be a novel concept to you, but feedback sometimes hurts.
Bingo. Customer support is expensive, and usually carried out by a third party who have a vested interested in "processing" you as quickly as possible, regardless of whether or not it solves your problem.
There might be some stupid and/or lazy staff, but the fundamental problem is at the top.
The "fundamental" problem is at both ends. People who stick up for the corporate policies out of one side of their mouth and out of the other tell us that there is no solution other than to take it; AND people at the top of these food chains who are calmly considering how to victimize their next "customers".
Slashdot Mirror
Only in America would someone who drives 20 miles a day consider himself to be someone who doesn't use roads much.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm just amazed at the differences in the way people see the world.
Perhaps that's because it's a different world they are seeing? *I* am amazed that everyone thinks the rest of the world is exactly like where they are, except the people are stupider.
Reality check: America is large. Many, many people live more than 20 miles away from where they work. (many!) A large percentage cannot live closer due to costs, another large percent due to "ick"-factors of city life (crime, pollution, lack of green space, etc), another large percent because they bought a permanent residence then switched jobs, etc. Most of the country also doesn't have adequate transportation infrastructure (no light rail, no commuter rail, little trans-continental rail).
So don't be too amazed at the differences in the way people see the world. You're better off being amazed at the actual different worlds people live in that drive how they see it.
I would also add that for certain religious groups, marijuana is a part of their spirituality. Same goes for peyote and various psylocibin producing mushrooms. Opiates, methamphetamines, and any synthetic drug I can think of only exist as profit/entertainment for people.
Well, you had better expand your list and your thought processes. It turns out there is a large subculture that finds spiritual uses for a variety of mind altering substances that are synthetically created.
MDMA easily comes to mind, LSD as well. DMT (the spirit molecule :P) more than passes. I'm sorry if you've never run into that subculture but that's life in the big world, but the list is relatively endless (See Shulgin, et. al. if you're interested for a small variety of two different branches of the spiritual pharmacopoeia (TIKAL, PHIKAL) ).
You don't get to decide what (drug/practice/etc.) has a spiritual component, especially when it comes to an individual's right to alter their own consciousness. Hope that helps.
all drugs exert a destructive influence on lives. every single one
With this as the your main premise and starting assertion, I need read no further, since I already disagree.
Thanks for pointing this out so clearly.
That's because often times, the truth talks softly.
Also true if you shot yourself in the head with your gun.
What was your point again?
The fees for wire transfers out of your accounts generally range from $20 to $30 per transaction.
Perhaps that's the reason?
How would you like it if you were a musician, and I started bootlegging every single last piece of merchandise that you every produced and gave it away for free or at just cost? Your t-shirts, your stickers, your cds, everything. Oh, and I stood there recording every live performance in high quality HD and gave it away for free to anyone too lazy or cheap to go to your show?
Sounds like the Grateful Dead, to me...
They didn't seem to have any problem with your supposed ISSUES!
Never mud wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
That's right. You should just shoot the pig instead. Bet it won't like that as much.
This is awesome! I would say that this is the solution to the problem, then.
Sell scrap yards their own scrap and infrastructure back in pieces. Let's see how long such places stay in business then...
Well, perhaps you should pay attention to what you post, then.
My statements are a rebuttal of the assertions you made.
Since you are being either an asshat or a pendant, let me reiterate the whole convo I replied to below:
When left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer
That would be dumb of them. Don't those employees have any interest in keeping their jobs and putting food on the table? How can they stay in business if they screw over their customers. What stops a customer from switching to another service provider?
and the consumer who has virtually no individual power
Their wallets are all the power they need. Don't like a company? Pick another? If another doesn't exist, persuade everyone you know to demand better service and another company will come along to provide that service (if the demand is high enough, of course).
Now that we have that out of the way, perhaps you can tell me where you went wrong yourself? No?
Then let me.
The OP was stating that businesses will try to fuck the consumer.
You go and say Nyah, they won't!
I then joined in and said(colloquially); given the preponderance of evidence of past actions of businesses, it is relatively certain that, left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer.
Is that clear enough for you? You are wrong and refuse to acknowledge it. Well, that's ok, I speak truth to idiocy, too.
Second point.
You stated that all the protection from businesses consumers need comes from their wallets("Their wallets are all the power they need.")
I replied, in effect, that historically, this *is not* all the consumers need. The thinking persons follow on observation may be seen as - perhaps that's true today, too!
If my post conveyed a lack of information to you, the reason is you refuse to see the information contained therein.
Cheers.
Yeah, there is no history of any company trying to fuck their customers. Because "it would be dum of them". Right.
Oh, and that vote with your wallet gig really has worked out quite well too - that *always* keeps those companies in line.
Perhaps you should take off your IBM coloured glasses?
I would have thought it perfectly clear that this is the issue.
We have a phenomenon. People are observing something. It doesn't make sense to a priori decide that what they are seeing is false or merely a product of their own minds.
Yet, this is exactly what science has turned in to. Your very post points this out in exquisite detail - I needn't even continue.
I wish there were ghosts too. And aliens. And psychics. It'd make the world a lot more interesting. But we're talking about reality here. Or so I assumed.
Yup, that's the problem. You ASSUME you know what reality is, and then go on to not even attempt to measure what you consider outside your reality - even when confronted with experiential evidence!
Thanks for making my point so eloquently.
Wrong answer.
The correct one is:
Well, let's see if there is anything detectable about these occurrences. Duh.
But thanks for playing.
All I can say is I'm glad that I will never be your research assistant.
Do you take credit for your student's papers, too?
Obviously there aren't ghosts, so any evidence to their existence must be explained some other way. That's what the scientific method is all about!
Perhaps it's a new transport mechanism, designed to compress, transport and unpack data objects(we can call them "clowns"). The cool thing would be that you get more data out during the unpack stage than you'd ever think would fit in so small a transport (we could call that a "car"!).
There you go.
So... you're trying to say that Apple can't produce enough hardware if demand increased?
Hm. I wonder what evidence you have to back this up. I'm pretty sure I can find at least one model that isn't on backorder. My take is that they purposefully do not create large inventories of computers at launch. As far as Apple being able to scale - does the Ipod or Iphone mean anything to you? How many have they shipped?
I doubt the premise of your post.
So, in fact all we need is to enforce existing laws.
None of this "over the internet" means something else happened bullshit. It's quite similar to how we geeks decry patents where the only difference is "with a computer."
How hard is it do grasp that? The woman abused a child. Period. The woman should be punished. Period.
She is guilty. And the thing she's guilty of is actually illegal when she did it.
Just because someone is abused over a computer doesn't mean they are not abused. Child abuse is child abuse, whether "with a computer" or without one.
Geeks seem to have no problem seeing that when we are talking about patents. What is so hard about extending your thought processes to other situations?
Did she abuse the girl or did she not? The smart money is on the fact that she did.
Perhaps this isn't the law to punish her with (TOS non-compliance, psh!) but we certainly have one that does work. Let's use that one instead.
...which they can change at any time to suit themselves.
Have you looked this nanosecond? How about now?
See the problem?
However, if I was starting a new small business, I believe I'd look at cutting cost as much as possible. You can get by with "even" a 486 unless your business needs number crunching powers. So, basically you can get free or near machines.
Now, to software licensing. It doesn't even remotely make sense to pay more for software than the hardware. And for almost all small businesses there are solutions that just work for the mission critical portions of the infrastructure (backup, website, even phones!).
There is really no "risk" for a small business to use the big open source packages. So they can't fix it themselves. So what. Did they think they were going to get MS (or whoever) to fix it for them (probably yes, but that just means they're delusional).
It just seems that the second round of computing went to lock-in solutions. Any business that grew up under these conditions might have a hell of a time extracting themselves, but you just have to ask - is survival worth it, or not?
I'd agree that most proprietary sw houses don't really know what it means to be a small business. I'd even argue that they don't really know what it means to be in business at all (hint - being a parasite is not a business opportunity).
Did Thomas Jefferson free all his slaves upon making that statement? No? Well, James Boyle freed his work by licensing it under the creative commons. Perfect.
So, what was your point again?
Of course, it is always possible that they are just not living up to their end of the bargain.
I don't consider myself a loser in those cases. I consider the person who isn't living up to their end of the bargain the loser, even if I suffer and they do not.
I'll not go over the article, just what I consider misguided.
Complaint 1: package management
Seems the guy wants everyone to use a single package management system, so that all the proprietary commercial software folks can sell their apps more easily across multiple target systems. His complaint with letting the repositories take care of that is proprietary software vendors are left in the lurch. Well, this seems like a plus to me then. If they want to play, they should either eat the cost of managing their own software across multiple delivery platforms (e.g. rethat, ubuntu, suse, etc.) or open source their code.
Complaint 2: there are too many config files!
Uuunh. Ever seen the numbers of config files on other systems? Some places call it a "registry" if that helps any... Enough said.
Complaint 3: application binary interfaces are a moving target
Yes. This needs fixing. What needs to be fixed is this "want" - that is the basic dysfunction in this case. Either you want progress or you want a static abi. Simple as that. Which "want" do you cater to? I know which I'm going with.
Complaint 4: Audio interfaces
It seems there are too many audio interfaces for the author. After all, if you need JACK you should probably have a Mac as PulseAudio should be good enough for anyone. /sarcasm
Complaint 5 GUIs should ultimately be the province of the kernel
I give you this quote:
To that end, what's needed is a single steering committee for all GUIs that work on Linux, so that whatever GUIs are created -- be they GNOME, KDE, or not-yet-invented -- will have a consistency of implementation on the backend, and make it possible to have tight integration of features with the kernel, a la BeOS. The kernel would publish a generic series of hooks that a GUI could make use of, and the GUI would be free to represent them to the user in any number of ways.
Which means that if the kernel doesn't present you with what you need, you're SOL. Or perhaps I am not reading that right but it seems that this would be much more of a clusterf*ck than the current path.
Most everything else he talks about are additional features that it would be nice for Linux to support; file versioning by default (would be cool, don't have it by default, that sucks), commercially hosted backup and restore (how is this a fault of Linux, again? - it seems more like a business opportunity to me), per application shutdown of X11 (actually a really great idea).
Cheers.
Not to disagree with you, but I do. *Shrug* Life's like that.
That would probably make you feel better, but a lot of these drones are restricted in what they're allowed to do and they're forced to go through standard scripts and procedures.
It is unfortunate that we as people put up with mindsets such as yours. Oh, wah - they aren't really real people so we should just shut up about it. Well, no. They *are* real people and if they fuck up they should know it. Yes, their actions are limited but within those bounds they can be just as much a good person or a dick as you or I.
And here is where you go off the deep end:
I'm sure that the supervisor appreciated some random asshole telling him how to do his job and manage his staff.
Well, yes. If he was a good supervisor. Who do you think is going to give him the most objective opinion on how his staff is helping people? Oh, I know! how about the people they are supposedly helping? I know it must be a novel concept to you, but feedback sometimes hurts.
Bingo. Customer support is expensive, and usually carried out by a third party who have a vested interested in "processing" you as quickly as possible, regardless of whether or not it solves your problem.
There might be some stupid and/or lazy staff, but the fundamental problem is at the top.
The "fundamental" problem is at both ends. People who stick up for the corporate policies out of one side of their mouth and out of the other tell us that there is no solution other than to take it; AND people at the top of these food chains who are calmly considering how to victimize their next "customers".