"Lovely, some short term investors would liek to crack open the golden goose and get allt he eggs now. "
I'm not sure why a long term investor would be waiting around for golden eggs from a menopausal goose. Especially when there are people in the market happy to pay them the going rate for young and healthy golden geese.
"This is why stocks are risky investments. They're not guarenteed and not insured. You can lose money. If you want a sure thing, invest in Treasury Bonds."
You can lose money in bonds too, even treasury ones. If whoever is in charge of printing money decides to print a lot more of it after you buy the bond, your future buying power is diluted and so the trading price of the bond can go down significantly, especially with long term bonds.
"Libertarian types get really hung up on institutionalized violence, but I don't think they've made the case that physical oppression is really any worse than emotional oppression."
My god. An outbreak of common sense on slashdot! No wonder it's moderated "interesting". If you listen closely, you might hear the fluttering sound of a few thousand people re-reading a certain 60 page monologue.
"As with everything else in life, you should exercise moderation."
Except, moderation doesn't work with addiction. An alcoholic can't have a bottle of alcohol in their house without drinking it. An addicted smoker can't have a cigarette and a lighter without smoking it (unless they've just had a fix). Someone addicted to WOW can't have an account and a computer without watching the sun come up as it gets time to go to work and thinking "Oh, crap."
Those who can do the moderation thing either aren't addicted or are only addicted slightly. Education of the consumer means that those with addictive personalities can get a heads up so that they don't try and fail the moderation thing.
"It was made very clear to him, in all but two answers, that he was not welcome, the wrong kind of user, morally inferior for wanting to play non-free games."
It's not that at all. He just doesn't know how to ask questions. ESR says it a lot better than I ever could. That essay is literally life changing. Read the whole thing.
In my experience, the open source environment has changed remarkably in the ten years I have been exposed to it. The amount of relevant information that can be found by a simple google search is staggering. That is the first stop, and is far quicker and more considerate of other people's time than posting to a forum.
Typing "wine " into google and scanning even the first page of results should have given your friend a good idea of whether he could have played the games he wanted to or not.
"Anyone remember the character Cypher from that movie? He was sick of the real world, his crappy life , crappy food and everything being a constant battle. He wanted to go back into the Matrix."
He must have forgotten that back in the Matrix, all he ever seemed to do was involuntarily post junk mail to people, in between phoning up random marketing companies to tell them what he was interested in.
"I'm not so sure. By now there ought to be a whole generation of tech-savvy people in their 20s-30s who grew up "doing the things with computers" that their parents just couldn't fathom. That group of people ought to be a big market, and I fall into the category. I've also installed a few different distros of Linux over the years, played with them for a bit, and then went back to using Windows."
I did that too, at least 4 times or so stretching back to 1997. The last time (Ubuntu) was a success. It's got to be getting close to a year ago. About a month in or so, I knew I was never going to go back.
There is no hard and fast "ready for the desktop" or "ready for primetime" as another poster here put it. Linux utility as compared to, say, XP is an individual decision for everyone who uses it. Effectively, applicability of an operating system to a population can be thought of as moving a slider bar over a continuum, with people who it is applicable for on one side and those for whom it is unacceptable on the other. Make a few changes, and that slider bar moves over a bit. And even with something like XP, there will still be a population for whom it is not dumbed down enough.
It is changing, over time. Things changed enough such that it was worth it for me to switch permanently. Whether or not it has changed enough for you to migrate is an open question.
"When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany." - Jesse Owens
"Hitler didn't snub me--it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." - Jesse Owens
"And you're comparing that to the BOTTOM half of all income tax payers? I don't know about the US tax laws, but in Australia they have a "Tax free" bracket (if you earn X per year). Meaning that some of the bottom half of all income tax payers are paying absolutley no tax at all."
You forgot GST, petrol, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. etc. Not to mention inflation, which is another form of tax.
"Now they pass this bullshit legislation that will, yet again, destroy the rights and civil liberities of collage kids."
Forget the legislation. The cruel practice of taking kids, applying paste and sticking them to a large piece of paper as some sick form of "art" is an outrage and must be stopped at all costs.
"Too bad most of the people who own guns in the US don't understand that's the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment. I admit that I didn't even understand that until a few years ago (I'm 24). It's not something they really focus on in school..."
A lot of salesmen gloss over informing consumers of their cooling-off period rights, too. Funny that.
"How about silly things like real working public transportation? Passenger trains between cities, silly crap like that."
Or even bicycle/human powered freeways? You can go a lot faster if you can travel in a straight direction without stopping or swerving to avoid an SUV. Freeway technology has been around since the autobahn, and long, straight roads have been around since at least Roman times.
Ends smog, obesity and energy independence problems very quickly.
"The fundamental difference is that engineers do tend to rely on things that are provably correct or experimentally verifiable, whereas religious extremists are predicating invisible omnipotent entities."
Wanting foreigners to stop controlling the destiny of your people for their profit and at your expense (whether they do so via invasion or manipulation of your leaders) has absolutely nothing to do with religion.
"We wanted to use Fedora 5 and it went all the way to office of [the Filipino] President and they kept passing it around saying 'why would they offer something for free, and how would they support and teach it'," Gonzalez said. "The project dragged on for four to five months to a point where Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper. Microsoft was also providing free training to high school teachers."
"In the 1960s, space represented many things and was very successful in focussing the USA in many ways. However, once done it has served its purpose and cannot easily serve it again."
In a depression, we would need something like a war to motivate the populace. A war of the major powers doesn't make much sense because they all have nukes. A space race on the other hand - a last ditch effort to give the earth a backup plan where resources are running out, etc... can make a lot of sense.
Given the mountain of debt and inflation of the money supply, a depression is not out of the question.
It's 0.1 inches thick, can be folded up to fit in a standard envelope, sports a 2 terabyte SSD and 8 cores, all while sipping only 3.5 Watts of juice. As a nod to Greenpeace, it is not only biodegradable, it is also edible. Early beta testers describe it as having a "cool mint" flavor, and there are reports of a "zesty orange" version in the works.
To enhance morale, at Apple there are gigantic posters of Steve Jobs fixing employees with what can only be described as a "level stare".
Ah, Kurzweil... the guy who has made a living forecasting future events based on extrapolating exponential curves. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
"You mean like... umm... I don't know... this entire universe of resources out there?"
Maybe when we finally get out ass in gear we'll realize that we need a quantity of a resource we used to squander just to get there in the first place. Could be helium, helium does have uses in rocketry.
"The brief flirtation humanity had with freedom will end,"
It ended before you were born. But like those who believe in their god while thinking everyone else worships false gods, a lot of people in the US believe in their media while thinking everyone else watches "propaganda". As Goethe said, none are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
"When people/buy/ software, I think they assume it comes with some magic factor X that makes it better than anything free, because it cannot have factor X, because it's free. And you gotta have that factor X, because, well, you just gotta..."
There are a lot of people who are addicted to buying things that are cheap to produce and yet have 90% of their costs in advertising. These people buy bottled water, Macs, expensive cosmetics, spa treatments, celebrity diets, Bose sound systems etc. and would never, ever buy a generic item.
There are few things that cure this. Some time spent away from television helps. So does working for one of these mentioned companies, seeing that the cheap stuff has the exact same ingredients as the expensive stuff. A good economic depression also will work wonders, forcing everyone to lower their standards. When you're eating bark because there is no food, at about that time most people lose brand loyalty.
Slashdot Mirror
"I doubt that learning how to ask the correct question is anything but sheer bullshit from a "customer" point of view."
How much did he pay for Wine?
"Lovely, some short term investors would liek to crack open the golden goose and get allt he eggs now. "
I'm not sure why a long term investor would be waiting around for golden eggs from a menopausal goose. Especially when there are people in the market happy to pay them the going rate for young and healthy golden geese.
"This is why stocks are risky investments. They're not guarenteed and not insured. You can lose money. If you want a sure thing, invest in Treasury Bonds."
You can lose money in bonds too, even treasury ones. If whoever is in charge of printing money decides to print a lot more of it after you buy the bond, your future buying power is diluted and so the trading price of the bond can go down significantly, especially with long term bonds.
"Libertarian types get really hung up on institutionalized violence, but I don't think they've made the case that physical oppression is really any worse than emotional oppression."
My god. An outbreak of common sense on slashdot! No wonder it's moderated "interesting". If you listen closely, you might hear the fluttering sound of a few thousand people re-reading a certain 60 page monologue.
"As with everything else in life, you should exercise moderation."
Except, moderation doesn't work with addiction. An alcoholic can't have a bottle of alcohol in their house without drinking it. An addicted smoker can't have a cigarette and a lighter without smoking it (unless they've just had a fix). Someone addicted to WOW can't have an account and a computer without watching the sun come up as it gets time to go to work and thinking "Oh, crap."
Those who can do the moderation thing either aren't addicted or are only addicted slightly. Education of the consumer means that those with addictive personalities can get a heads up so that they don't try and fail the moderation thing.
"The Ubuntu community forums, happily, seem to be frequented by more polite human beings, and the Wiki is pretty well maintained."
It's less that they are frequented by more polite human beings, and more that they have a good moderation policy and good moderators.
"It was made very clear to him, in all but two answers, that he was not welcome, the wrong kind of user, morally inferior for wanting to play non-free games."
It's not that at all. He just doesn't know how to ask questions. ESR says it a lot better than I ever could. That essay is literally life changing. Read the whole thing.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
In my experience, the open source environment has changed remarkably in the ten years I have been exposed to it. The amount of relevant information that can be found by a simple google search is staggering. That is the first stop, and is far quicker and more considerate of other people's time than posting to a forum.
Typing "wine " into google and scanning even the first page of results should have given your friend a good idea of whether he could have played the games he wanted to or not.
"Anyone remember the character Cypher from that movie? He was sick of the real world, his crappy life , crappy food and everything being a constant battle. He wanted to go back into the Matrix."
He must have forgotten that back in the Matrix, all he ever seemed to do was involuntarily post junk mail to people, in between phoning up random marketing companies to tell them what he was interested in.
"I'm not so sure. By now there ought to be a whole generation of tech-savvy people in their 20s-30s who grew up "doing the things with computers" that their parents just couldn't fathom. That group of people ought to be a big market, and I fall into the category. I've also installed a few different distros of Linux over the years, played with them for a bit, and then went back to using Windows."
I did that too, at least 4 times or so stretching back to 1997. The last time (Ubuntu) was a success. It's got to be getting close to a year ago. About a month in or so, I knew I was never going to go back.
There is no hard and fast "ready for the desktop" or "ready for primetime" as another poster here put it. Linux utility as compared to, say, XP is an individual decision for everyone who uses it. Effectively, applicability of an operating system to a population can be thought of as moving a slider bar over a continuum, with people who it is applicable for on one side and those for whom it is unacceptable on the other. Make a few changes, and that slider bar moves over a bit. And even with something like XP, there will still be a population for whom it is not dumbed down enough.
It is changing, over time. Things changed enough such that it was worth it for me to switch permanently. Whether or not it has changed enough for you to migrate is an open question.
"When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany." - Jesse Owens
"Hitler didn't snub me--it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." - Jesse Owens
"Oh, yes they are. China has about 1400 billion dollars. If they dump this cash on the market, the dollar would instantly be worthless."
Rubbish. You try getting oil out of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait etc. without US dollars. Or try running most countries without oil.
Sure, such an action might devalue the dollar a bit, or even a lot, but the US economy sure isn't going to collapse over it.
"And you're comparing that to the BOTTOM half of all income tax payers? I don't know about the US tax laws, but in Australia they have a "Tax free" bracket (if you earn X per year). Meaning that some of the bottom half of all income tax payers are paying absolutley no tax at all."
You forgot GST, petrol, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. etc. Not to mention inflation, which is another form of tax.
"Now they pass this bullshit legislation that will, yet again, destroy the rights and civil liberities of collage kids."
Forget the legislation. The cruel practice of taking kids, applying paste and sticking them to a large piece of paper as some sick form of "art" is an outrage and must be stopped at all costs.
"Too bad most of the people who own guns in the US don't understand that's the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment. I admit that I didn't even understand that until a few years ago (I'm 24). It's not something they really focus on in school..."
A lot of salesmen gloss over informing consumers of their cooling-off period rights, too. Funny that.
"How about silly things like real working public transportation?
Passenger trains between cities, silly crap like that."
Or even bicycle/human powered freeways? You can go a lot faster if you can travel in a straight direction without stopping or swerving to avoid an SUV. Freeway technology has been around since the autobahn, and long, straight roads have been around since at least Roman times.
Ends smog, obesity and energy independence problems very quickly.
"The fundamental difference is that engineers do tend to rely on things that are provably correct or experimentally verifiable, whereas religious extremists are predicating invisible omnipotent entities."
Wanting foreigners to stop controlling the destiny of your people for their profit and at your expense (whether they do so via invasion or manipulation of your leaders) has absolutely nothing to do with religion.
"We wanted to use Fedora 5 and it went all the way to office of [the Filipino] President and they kept passing it around saying 'why would they offer something for free, and how would they support and teach it'," Gonzalez said. "The project dragged on for four to five months to a point where Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper. Microsoft was also providing free training to high school teachers."
That is the sound of inevitability.
"On a beautiful 1986 summer day in Poland the secret police confiscated all Geiger detectors from all the schools and universities."
On March 26, 2006, the Federal Reserve Bank ceased publication of the M3 monetary aggregate.
"In the 1960s, space represented many things and was very successful in focussing the USA in many ways. However, once done it has served its purpose and cannot easily serve it again."
In a depression, we would need something like a war to motivate the populace. A war of the major powers doesn't make much sense because they all have nukes. A space race on the other hand - a last ditch effort to give the earth a backup plan where resources are running out, etc... can make a lot of sense.
Given the mountain of debt and inflation of the money supply, a depression is not out of the question.
It's 0.1 inches thick, can be folded up to fit in a standard envelope, sports a 2 terabyte SSD and 8 cores, all while sipping only 3.5 Watts of juice. As a nod to Greenpeace, it is not only biodegradable, it is also edible. Early beta testers describe it as having a "cool mint" flavor, and there are reports of a "zesty orange" version in the works.
To enhance morale, at Apple there are gigantic posters of Steve Jobs fixing employees with what can only be described as a "level stare".
"Remember to spell 'crisis' as 'business opportunity'."
I hear there's excellent money to be made if you can convert lead into gold, too.
Ah, Kurzweil... the guy who has made a living forecasting future events based on extrapolating exponential curves. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
"You mean like... umm... I don't know... this entire universe of resources out there?"
Maybe when we finally get out ass in gear we'll realize that we need a quantity of a resource we used to squander just to get there in the first place. Could be helium, helium does have uses in rocketry.
"The brief flirtation humanity had with freedom will end,"
It ended before you were born. But like those who believe in their god while thinking everyone else worships false gods, a lot of people in the US believe in their media while thinking everyone else watches "propaganda". As Goethe said, none are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
"When people /buy/ software, I think they assume it comes with some magic factor X that makes it better than anything free, because it cannot have factor X, because it's free. And you gotta have that factor X, because, well, you just gotta..."
There are a lot of people who are addicted to buying things that are cheap to produce and yet have 90% of their costs in advertising. These people buy bottled water, Macs, expensive cosmetics, spa treatments, celebrity diets, Bose sound systems etc. and would never, ever buy a generic item.
There are few things that cure this. Some time spent away from television helps. So does working for one of these mentioned companies, seeing that the cheap stuff has the exact same ingredients as the expensive stuff. A good economic depression also will work wonders, forcing everyone to lower their standards. When you're eating bark because there is no food, at about that time most people lose brand loyalty.