You might want to dig out a logic textbook and review.
A single counterexample (you) doesn't prove that my statement is false. It merely proves that it is not UNIVERSALLY true. On the whole, in most cases, my statement is absolutely correct. Again, you're a statistical outlyer, and not significant in terms of the broader discussion.
If you hadn't wasted your entire undergraduate degree farting around with HISTORY, of all things, you'd know that. What an incredible waste of time! Ah, well, I'm sure you had fun while the rest of us were studying.
It's hilarious that you claim you had a job "waiting for you" at some NSA-like agency in Canada, which would have paid better than a programming job. Yeah, I'm sure. And with this hot job waiting for you, you just turned it down to play with "teh shiny" eh? Bullshit. Either they didn't want YOU, or it wasn't much of a job to begin with. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" eh?
And after that huge, long-winded diatribe, you STILL haven't done a single thing to prove my points wrong. You're NOT A HISTORIAN, dumbass. You studied it once. It has NOTHING to do with what you do now. If you've been a programmer since 1982, I hate to break it to you, you're a programming geek, not an arty-farty historian type.
EVEN IF you put on airs and tell yourself what an artfag you are, EVEN IF when you're not programming you're wandering around coffee houses in a turtleneck and a blazer, bothering people with your "insights" about the history of technology, EVEN IF you're as pretentious an ass as you seem to be, YOU'RE STILL A PROGRAMMER, NOT A HISTORIAN.
And you want to talk about "arrogant"? What makes you think you have anything to "teach" us? How irritating. How pretentious.
Useful but hardly sufficient. Of course you spent quite a bit of time learning my trade, and those skills did NOT come from historian training.
What really happened here is, you used to be a historian but there was no money in it. So you bought a LOT of books, and you retrained as a programmer.
Your experience proves nothing. You have no point. You are merely distracting everyone with a pointless story about how it's possible for a historian to learn about technology. How is this new or proof of anything besides the fact that you couldn't make a living with your historian training? How does this have anything to do with MY point, which is that most arty-farty types know nothing about high tech and therefore should really just stop talking about it?
He wanted to evaluate how technolust affected people, so he told the interns at his hospital to give the people on the seventh floor (mildly psychotic, neurotic, etc) whatever gadgets or items they wanted, so they could simulate the first thing they would do when they were discharged.
A week later, he made his rounds. The first guy he visited was playing with a toy laptop. He asked him what he was doing. He said he intended to catch up with Slashdot when he got out, and that the laptop was letting him practice his typing.
The second guy was tinkering with a small palm pilot. When asked, he said that he was a CTO before he was committed, and he wanted to go back to that life. The palm pilot was going to help him get used to handling all the messages he would see all day.
The third patient was stark naked, rubbing handfuls of walnuts on his groin.
"What the fuck are you doing???" the psychiatrist yelled.
"You BASTARD! I was FUCKING NUTS when I got here, and I'll be FUCKING NUTS when I leave!"
I think the brits just like having things to worry about. I've never seen ANY group of guys who spent so much time worried about whether they were cool enough or had something terrible wrong with them. The more I read about Britain the more I think most of the guys over there have this dialog running in their heads all day:
"Oh, god, I'm a wanker, aren't I? I am, aren't I? Jeremy just looked at me. What was that grin? It's a WANKER-ID grin! He knows I'm a wanker! He can TELL! Oh, god, is it obvious? Wait; do I smell? I bet I smell. I don't smell anything, but maybe that doesn't prove anything... OH, GOD, only a wanker would think that! Wait; here comes a bird, let's see what happens... She smirked. OH, GOD, I AM A WANKER! It's all over, mate... I'm going to the pub."
Seriously, how do they stand it? I'd pull a lemming in three days flat if that was MY internal dialog. Straight off the Mohawk River Bridge.
Hey, all you British guys. Listen. I'm a Yank. I'm fat, ugly, I never get laid and my clothes are all boring and unoriginal. My job sucks, my coworkers all think I'm an asshole, and I'm probably going to become the male version of the "cat lady" who grows old surrounded by hundreds of feral cats (since I'm a guy, it'll probably be ferrets or wolverines or something, but still -- same thing).
Do I look like I'm worried about it?
Do I look like I'm driving myself nuts all day over it?
HELL NO.
I'm PROUD of it. I'm NUTS! And I gleefully tell anyone who will listen all ABOUT it.
Ok, you've got me there -- you guys DO have a lot of pull with the government. So... Touche.
On your next point, I think that academics with a background in technology tend to not be too useless. Usually they tend to be more sensible than the mainstream "liberal artisans" (a friend of mine calls them this) they're lumped in with. I'd trust Kuhn or Hegel to come up with a sensible point; the historian of the article, on the other hand... Well...
I occasionally experience the suspicion that luddites like him would prefer to write their screeds on a beat up old Royal typewriter, mailing their screeds to a publisher in an ink-stained manila envelope. Sometimes I suspect that they are in love with an idealized view of "how things used to be" rather than how they ever actually WERE. And of course, I find them to be amusing little pinatas, painted with gay colors, attractive and hanging low enough to take easy, languid swipes at.:)
Points, schmoints. We're chewing the fat on a public forum. But if you want to get all lawyerly with me, my POINT is that non-technologists don't know what they're talking about when it comes to technology, and are part of a subculture that takes pride in distrusting and disliking science and technology, so they're not really worth paying attention to. The best approach is ridicule, followed by disdain.
As far as "practice law" goes, well, you should recalibrate your humor detector; I think it's on the fritz. Maybe Satan can lend you his? Speaking of which, what makes you think you can't be outsourced? Legal departments are one of the things companies are thinking of getting rid of, right up there with middle management. Better hang out your shingle while you can...
P.S. I wasn't "talking smack about" you, per se. At least lawyers practice a skilled trade. I was discussing the useless academics that sit around and pontificate about things they have no direct knowledge of, and aren't involved with, as though their lofty title "historian" (sometimes it's a "Philosopher") gives them some special insight. They're ridiculous people, convinced that their dusty old books contain actual knowledge. The TRUTH is, they're just regurgitating the same, tired old OPINIONS their little cadre has decided to support. It's all crap.
Oh, and I'm not posting this in a hostile mood -- I'm rather enjoying this bit of fencing. So don't take it personally, i'm just playing with you. I'm right about the arty-farty crowd, though. You know it's true.
Oh, I agree. I have a copy of the Collected Works of William Shakespeare myself, right next to my collection of Lovecraft and Poe.
But people deify him; he was just a writer! Making him into some kind of god is just silly. And the idea that nobody since has been his equal is just nutty. I'd rather read Henry Miller any day. Or Kerouac, or Chuck Palahniuk. MUCH more interesting and relevant to my century, you know?:)
Yeah, ok. You didn't get your lawyer job with your knowledge of Shakespeare, pal. You studied a specific TRADE in LAW SCHOOL. All that arty-farty crap you studied beforehand was just an artificial barrier to entry designed to reduce the field to people with enough money to pay for six to eight years of school. There's no *practical* reason why "law school" can't be an undergrad degree.
My point about diff.eq and calculus was that techies study these things in school. I did. You did not.
Congratulations on your rental successes, I'm sure you're very happy. But tell me, did you get a good price for your soul? There are so many lawyers getting minted these days, I can't help but think the prices may be dropping...
Most writers can barely boot their computers. They also idolize people who have been dead for hundreds of years; most of them have a bust of Shakespeare hidden somewhere about their apartment, and consider him to be the sine qua non of literature, even though he was actually his era's equivalent of a Hollywood screenwriter. If he was alive today, he'd be doing Buffy episodes.
Seriously, this sort of story stinks of sour grapes. Most of the arty-farty crowd can barely pay their rent, and they've long envied the successes of the technical sector. Even back in school, while those of us who were able were studying differential equations and calculus (and the arty were saying things like "math is hard") it was that way. Try telling some lit major about your new file server, see how interested he is in it. Good luck; you'll be lucky if he or she sticks around for more than five minutes.
Technologists change the world on a regular basis. Writers complain about it, then wax nostalgic about it, and finally dismiss it as overblown. Has it ever been any different?
Yeah, but the point the guy was making was, Marines generally won't do anything to a civilian unless he tries to do something to them FIRST.
Yeah, about all that would happen would be that the Marines would stand around looking at each other, telling dirty jokes, occasionally chatting with some of the protesters, and checking out some of the chicks. It would be pretty uneventful.
The NCOs would probably figure out some kind of way to regulate the protest so everyone could have a nice, quiet night. I can picture my old Gunny already:
"Ok, all you hippies, let's have a nice orderly protest, stay away from the shop windows, and form a nice, peaceful formation in the center of the park there. Thaaaaat's right. Right there! Hey, you, with the signs! Over to the right. The hot chick's waving at you. The other one. No, the one in the tube top. There ya go..."
Semper fi, man. 1st Bn, 4th Mar, a nice little amphibious raid unit. Stationed on the USS Ogden during the 1st Gulf War... We were the first unit to arrive, but we spent the whole time anchored out in the Gulf near Oman. Not that I'm complaining, mind you...:)
I can vouch for this. In my old unit, if our liutenant (who we didn't like anyway) had yelled "Open fire!" and pointed at a bunch of cute hippie chicks, we'd fire, alright -- at HIM. We might even put a second magazine into him "just to be sure".
Then we'd hang out with the hippie chicks. Mmm... Hippie chicks...
I kind of thought they all did, but I wasn't sure. Lots of 'em even have keyboards now.
What is Apple thinking? I'm picturing one of those "I'm a Mac" commercials, with Steve Jobs and a developer/geek type of guy, going something like this:
Steve Jobs: "Hi, I'm your new mobile technology overlord."
Techie: "Hi, MTO. I'm a geek. What's that you've got there?"
Steve Jobs: "This? Oh, this is an iPhone. You can't have one yet. But soon, you'll LOVE them."
Techie: "Why can't I have one yet?"
Steve Jobs: "Because we will sell no wine before its time."
Techie: "You're thinking of Orson Welles. Seriously, why can't we have one yet?"
Steve Jobs: "It's not released yet. But it's coming."
Techie: "Ok, um... Fine. So, what does it do?"
Steve Jobs: "Everything! It's beautiful, it plays music and movies and video games, it's sexy, there are many flashing lights, and if you bring it to a rave, it'll even get you LAID."
Techie: "Sweet! So I guess you have a nice developer kit for it, right? Probably Java enabled... Man, I bet I could build some cool stuff for that..."
Steve Jobs: "No."
Techie: "Beg pardon?"
Steve Jobs: "NO."
Techie: "Why not? Wait; aha! You're letting a third party design the development tools, like CodeWarrior or something. Ok, that's cool, I'll just..."
Steve Jobs: "NO!!! If you really MUST develop for this device, build a website on a server! The browser in this device is completely safari-capable. This is the New Way to Develop, anyway, everyone knows everything is web based now."
Techie: "What? You're fucking kidding me."
Steve Jobs: "I am not fucking kidding you. Behold!" (A presentation flies up out of nowhere and goes on for a while, with rave music."
Steve Jobs: "You may adore me now."
Techie: "You suck. Your phone sucks. I'm going to go get a PDA."
(Techie walks off, shaking head. Steve, looking perplexed, looks in the direction the techie walked. He holds up the phone and says after him "Hey! Tetris!").
Well, I know I'm not going to buy one. Think about the niche it's trying to occupy: the PDA/phone combination. There are a LOT of PDA phones out there, and at least some of them allow you to use WiFi without a contract. And ANY PDA can use WiFi as long as you have the third-party attachment (what do they cost now, fifty bucks?).
The iPhone is a very shiny, very pretty bit of conspicuous consumption fluff. It's for the Paris Hilton crowd, not us techies.
I've been thinking about a Blackberry, myself, not for work but just to work with.
And now, instead of merely being an apologist for cronyism, you're desperately trying to suggest that maybe it's NOT cronyism, and I'm just not noticing the special hidden talents of the cronies, who are all special and unique, like snowflakes.
Come on, give us another one. I bet you never run out.
You again? This is turning into the Neverending Story.
No, I'm not high strung. I just deeply hate Republicans and all those who make excuses for their behavior. They're evil people.
And no, dummy, torpedoing a crony is NOT cronyism. It's standing up for the belief that jobs should be allocated based on talent and experience, something you should look into. It's the OPPOSITE of cronyism.
Go ahead, keep making your excuses. I hear they're keeping hell hot for you.
Time Warner is primarily a MEDIA COMPANY. They make and sell movies. I believe they also own music collections that they sell.
I'll bet you anything that this whole "packet shaping" thing is MAINLY about one specific issue: slowing down the trading of illegally copied music and movies via P2P systems. This trading affects Time Warner's core business, and packet shaping is an easy step they can take to make it much more difficult to trade movies and music on their networks.
As a less important side issue, Time Warner has been trying (without much success I suspect) to sell their own VOIP system. Maybe as a side benefit to the main goal, they think they can reduce competition for their VOIP product.
It's not that they're going to promise you one bandwidth and pull a bait and switch on you. If you're just doing normal browsing and maybe YouTube, you probably won't notice anything different.
But if they perceive you as screwing around with their core business, then as far as they're concerned you're probably fair game.
It's not THAT unreasonable. They just want to put the kibosh on behavior that is, technically, still illegal and takes bread out of their mouths.
Sorry, pal, you're full of shit -- and that's better than you having no idea, right?
I grew up right here in New York. Cronyism was "rewarded" (at the middle class level, anyway) with hatred and continuous attempts by everyone else to torpedo the crony. If you get a job with one of us because "daddy's somebody" you're going DOWN, kid. And it's been that way as long as I remember.
Now go fuck yourself, you apologist swine. You make me sick.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, by the way --
You might want to dig out a logic textbook and review.
A single counterexample (you) doesn't prove that my statement is false. It merely proves that it is not UNIVERSALLY true. On the whole, in most cases, my statement is absolutely correct. Again, you're a statistical outlyer, and not significant in terms of the broader discussion.
If you hadn't wasted your entire undergraduate degree farting around with HISTORY, of all things, you'd know that. What an incredible waste of time! Ah, well, I'm sure you had fun while the rest of us were studying.
It's hilarious that you claim you had a job "waiting for you" at some NSA-like agency in Canada, which would have paid better than a programming job. Yeah, I'm sure. And with this hot job waiting for you, you just turned it down to play with "teh shiny" eh? Bullshit. Either they didn't want YOU, or it wasn't much of a job to begin with. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" eh?
Ta.
And after that huge, long-winded diatribe, you STILL haven't done a single thing to prove my points wrong. You're NOT A HISTORIAN, dumbass. You studied it once. It has NOTHING to do with what you do now. If you've been a programmer since 1982, I hate to break it to you, you're a programming geek, not an arty-farty historian type.
EVEN IF you put on airs and tell yourself what an artfag you are, EVEN IF when you're not programming you're wandering around coffee houses in a turtleneck and a blazer, bothering people with your "insights" about the history of technology, EVEN IF you're as pretentious an ass as you seem to be, YOU'RE STILL A PROGRAMMER, NOT A HISTORIAN.
And you want to talk about "arrogant"? What makes you think you have anything to "teach" us? How irritating. How pretentious.
Go bother someone who gives a shit.
Useful but hardly sufficient. Of course you spent quite a bit of time learning my trade, and those skills did NOT come from historian training.
What really happened here is, you used to be a historian but there was no money in it. So you bought a LOT of books, and you retrained as a programmer.
Your experience proves nothing. You have no point. You are merely distracting everyone with a pointless story about how it's possible for a historian to learn about technology. How is this new or proof of anything besides the fact that you couldn't make a living with your historian training? How does this have anything to do with MY point, which is that most arty-farty types know nothing about high tech and therefore should really just stop talking about it?
I mean really.
He wanted to evaluate how technolust affected people, so he told the interns at his hospital to give the people on the seventh floor (mildly psychotic, neurotic, etc) whatever gadgets or items they wanted, so they could simulate the first thing they would do when they were discharged.
A week later, he made his rounds. The first guy he visited was playing with a toy laptop. He asked him what he was doing. He said he intended to catch up with Slashdot when he got out, and that the laptop was letting him practice his typing.
The second guy was tinkering with a small palm pilot. When asked, he said that he was a CTO before he was committed, and he wanted to go back to that life. The palm pilot was going to help him get used to handling all the messages he would see all day.
The third patient was stark naked, rubbing handfuls of walnuts on his groin.
"What the fuck are you doing???" the psychiatrist yelled.
"You BASTARD! I was FUCKING NUTS when I got here, and I'll be FUCKING NUTS when I leave!"
The experiment was a failure.
It's cool; it's back up to "insightful".
Redemption!
I think the brits just like having things to worry about. I've never seen ANY group of guys who spent so much time worried about whether they were cool enough or had something terrible wrong with them. The more I read about Britain the more I think most of the guys over there have this dialog running in their heads all day:
"Oh, god, I'm a wanker, aren't I? I am, aren't I? Jeremy just looked at me. What was that grin? It's a WANKER-ID grin! He knows I'm a wanker! He can TELL! Oh, god, is it obvious? Wait; do I smell? I bet I smell. I don't smell anything, but maybe that doesn't prove anything... OH, GOD, only a wanker would think that! Wait; here comes a bird, let's see what happens... She smirked. OH, GOD, I AM A WANKER! It's all over, mate... I'm going to the pub."
Seriously, how do they stand it? I'd pull a lemming in three days flat if that was MY internal dialog. Straight off the Mohawk River Bridge.
Hey, all you British guys. Listen. I'm a Yank. I'm fat, ugly, I never get laid and my clothes are all boring and unoriginal. My job sucks, my coworkers all think I'm an asshole, and I'm probably going to become the male version of the "cat lady" who grows old surrounded by hundreds of feral cats (since I'm a guy, it'll probably be ferrets or wolverines or something, but still -- same thing).
Do I look like I'm worried about it?
Do I look like I'm driving myself nuts all day over it?
HELL NO.
I'm PROUD of it. I'm NUTS! And I gleefully tell anyone who will listen all ABOUT it.
Just do that. You'll feel better in no time!
You are a statistical outlyer, not a trend. I seriously doubt very many historians could duplicate your experience.
Ok, you've got me there -- you guys DO have a lot of pull with the government. So... Touche.
:)
On your next point, I think that academics with a background in technology tend to not be too useless. Usually they tend to be more sensible than the mainstream "liberal artisans" (a friend of mine calls them this) they're lumped in with. I'd trust Kuhn or Hegel to come up with a sensible point; the historian of the article, on the other hand... Well...
I occasionally experience the suspicion that luddites like him would prefer to write their screeds on a beat up old Royal typewriter, mailing their screeds to a publisher in an ink-stained manila envelope. Sometimes I suspect that they are in love with an idealized view of "how things used to be" rather than how they ever actually WERE. And of course, I find them to be amusing little pinatas, painted with gay colors, attractive and hanging low enough to take easy, languid swipes at.
Points, schmoints. We're chewing the fat on a public forum. But if you want to get all lawyerly with me, my POINT is that non-technologists don't know what they're talking about when it comes to technology, and are part of a subculture that takes pride in distrusting and disliking science and technology, so they're not really worth paying attention to. The best approach is ridicule, followed by disdain.
As far as "practice law" goes, well, you should recalibrate your humor detector; I think it's on the fritz. Maybe Satan can lend you his? Speaking of which, what makes you think you can't be outsourced? Legal departments are one of the things companies are thinking of getting rid of, right up there with middle management. Better hang out your shingle while you can...
P.S. I wasn't "talking smack about" you, per se. At least lawyers practice a skilled trade. I was discussing the useless academics that sit around and pontificate about things they have no direct knowledge of, and aren't involved with, as though their lofty title "historian" (sometimes it's a "Philosopher") gives them some special insight. They're ridiculous people, convinced that their dusty old books contain actual knowledge. The TRUTH is, they're just regurgitating the same, tired old OPINIONS their little cadre has decided to support. It's all crap.
Oh, and I'm not posting this in a hostile mood -- I'm rather enjoying this bit of fencing. So don't take it personally, i'm just playing with you. I'm right about the arty-farty crowd, though. You know it's true.
Oh, I agree. I have a copy of the Collected Works of William Shakespeare myself, right next to my collection of Lovecraft and Poe.
:)
But people deify him; he was just a writer! Making him into some kind of god is just silly. And the idea that nobody since has been his equal is just nutty. I'd rather read Henry Miller any day. Or Kerouac, or Chuck Palahniuk. MUCH more interesting and relevant to my century, you know?
Yeah, ok. You didn't get your lawyer job with your knowledge of Shakespeare, pal. You studied a specific TRADE in LAW SCHOOL. All that arty-farty crap you studied beforehand was just an artificial barrier to entry designed to reduce the field to people with enough money to pay for six to eight years of school. There's no *practical* reason why "law school" can't be an undergrad degree.
My point about diff.eq and calculus was that techies study these things in school. I did. You did not.
Congratulations on your rental successes, I'm sure you're very happy. But tell me, did you get a good price for your soul? There are so many lawyers getting minted these days, I can't help but think the prices may be dropping...
Most writers can barely boot their computers. They also idolize people who have been dead for hundreds of years; most of them have a bust of Shakespeare hidden somewhere about their apartment, and consider him to be the sine qua non of literature, even though he was actually his era's equivalent of a Hollywood screenwriter. If he was alive today, he'd be doing Buffy episodes.
Seriously, this sort of story stinks of sour grapes. Most of the arty-farty crowd can barely pay their rent, and they've long envied the successes of the technical sector. Even back in school, while those of us who were able were studying differential equations and calculus (and the arty were saying things like "math is hard") it was that way. Try telling some lit major about your new file server, see how interested he is in it. Good luck; you'll be lucky if he or she sticks around for more than five minutes.
Technologists change the world on a regular basis. Writers complain about it, then wax nostalgic about it, and finally dismiss it as overblown. Has it ever been any different?
Feh. What a lot of hot air.
Oh, I wouldn't say we MISSED the wars... Heh heh... More like they missed US. Bad aim!
Yeah, but the point the guy was making was, Marines generally won't do anything to a civilian unless he tries to do something to them FIRST.
Yeah, about all that would happen would be that the Marines would stand around looking at each other, telling dirty jokes, occasionally chatting with some of the protesters, and checking out some of the chicks. It would be pretty uneventful.
The NCOs would probably figure out some kind of way to regulate the protest so everyone could have a nice, quiet night. I can picture my old Gunny already:
"Ok, all you hippies, let's have a nice orderly protest, stay away from the shop windows, and form a nice, peaceful formation in the center of the park there. Thaaaaat's right. Right there! Hey, you, with the signs! Over to the right. The hot chick's waving at you. The other one. No, the one in the tube top. There ya go..."
Semper fi, man. 1st Bn, 4th Mar, a nice little amphibious raid unit. Stationed on the USS Ogden during the 1st Gulf War... We were the first unit to arrive, but we spent the whole time anchored out in the Gulf near Oman. Not that I'm complaining, mind you... :)
I can vouch for this. In my old unit, if our liutenant (who we didn't like anyway) had yelled "Open fire!" and pointed at a bunch of cute hippie chicks, we'd fire, alright -- at HIM. We might even put a second magazine into him "just to be sure".
Then we'd hang out with the hippie chicks. Mmm... Hippie chicks...
That, gentlemen, is a great big cock.
What?
It's basically a big rooster, right?
What's that look for?
I kind of thought they all did, but I wasn't sure. Lots of 'em even have keyboards now.
What is Apple thinking? I'm picturing one of those "I'm a Mac" commercials, with Steve Jobs and a developer/geek type of guy, going something like this:
Steve Jobs: "Hi, I'm your new mobile technology overlord."
Techie: "Hi, MTO. I'm a geek. What's that you've got there?"
Steve Jobs: "This? Oh, this is an iPhone. You can't have one yet. But soon, you'll LOVE them."
Techie: "Why can't I have one yet?"
Steve Jobs: "Because we will sell no wine before its time."
Techie: "You're thinking of Orson Welles. Seriously, why can't we have one yet?"
Steve Jobs: "It's not released yet. But it's coming."
Techie: "Ok, um... Fine. So, what does it do?"
Steve Jobs: "Everything! It's beautiful, it plays music and movies and video games, it's sexy, there are many flashing lights, and if you bring it to a rave, it'll even get you LAID."
Techie: "Sweet! So I guess you have a nice developer kit for it, right? Probably Java enabled... Man, I bet I could build some cool stuff for that..."
Steve Jobs: "No."
Techie: "Beg pardon?"
Steve Jobs: "NO."
Techie: "Why not? Wait; aha! You're letting a third party design the development tools, like CodeWarrior or something. Ok, that's cool, I'll just..."
Steve Jobs: "NO!!! If you really MUST develop for this device, build a website on a server! The browser in this device is completely safari-capable. This is the New Way to Develop, anyway, everyone knows everything is web based now."
Techie: "What? You're fucking kidding me."
Steve Jobs: "I am not fucking kidding you. Behold!" (A presentation flies up out of nowhere and goes on for a while, with rave music."
Steve Jobs: "You may adore me now."
Techie: "You suck. Your phone sucks. I'm going to go get a PDA."
(Techie walks off, shaking head. Steve, looking perplexed, looks in the direction the techie walked. He holds up the phone and says after him "Hey! Tetris!").
Well, I know I'm not going to buy one. Think about the niche it's trying to occupy: the PDA/phone combination. There are a LOT of PDA phones out there, and at least some of them allow you to use WiFi without a contract. And ANY PDA can use WiFi as long as you have the third-party attachment (what do they cost now, fifty bucks?).
The iPhone is a very shiny, very pretty bit of conspicuous consumption fluff. It's for the Paris Hilton crowd, not us techies.
I've been thinking about a Blackberry, myself, not for work but just to work with.
And now, instead of merely being an apologist for cronyism, you're desperately trying to suggest that maybe it's NOT cronyism, and I'm just not noticing the special hidden talents of the cronies, who are all special and unique, like snowflakes.
Come on, give us another one. I bet you never run out.
Yes, but they probably still have "interests" there.
You again? This is turning into the Neverending Story.
No, I'm not high strung. I just deeply hate Republicans and all those who make excuses for their behavior. They're evil people.
And no, dummy, torpedoing a crony is NOT cronyism. It's standing up for the belief that jobs should be allocated based on talent and experience, something you should look into. It's the OPPOSITE of cronyism.
Go ahead, keep making your excuses. I hear they're keeping hell hot for you.
Time Warner is primarily a MEDIA COMPANY. They make and sell movies. I believe they also own music collections that they sell.
I'll bet you anything that this whole "packet shaping" thing is MAINLY about one specific issue: slowing down the trading of illegally copied music and movies via P2P systems. This trading affects Time Warner's core business, and packet shaping is an easy step they can take to make it much more difficult to trade movies and music on their networks.
As a less important side issue, Time Warner has been trying (without much success I suspect) to sell their own VOIP system. Maybe as a side benefit to the main goal, they think they can reduce competition for their VOIP product.
It's not that they're going to promise you one bandwidth and pull a bait and switch on you. If you're just doing normal browsing and maybe YouTube, you probably won't notice anything different.
But if they perceive you as screwing around with their core business, then as far as they're concerned you're probably fair game.
It's not THAT unreasonable. They just want to put the kibosh on behavior that is, technically, still illegal and takes bread out of their mouths.
I didn't get the popup either, and all I'm using is adblock and noscript (the plain vanilla versions).
God BLESS noscript! And AdBlock ROCKS.
Sorry, pal, you're full of shit -- and that's better than you having no idea, right?
I grew up right here in New York. Cronyism was "rewarded" (at the middle class level, anyway) with hatred and continuous attempts by everyone else to torpedo the crony. If you get a job with one of us because "daddy's somebody" you're going DOWN, kid. And it's been that way as long as I remember.
Now go fuck yourself, you apologist swine. You make me sick.