I think Opera messed itself up by selling their web browser at first. People saw FireFox and perceived it to be far better than IE, and at least "good enough" against Opera, and FireFox was free, so there you go.
I did address your points; you just didn't like the fact that I didn't agree.
Second of all, when it comes to discussing cutting corners, you know exactly what I meant. You're just resorting to delay and confuse tactics now. I meant cutting corners as in ignoring things like safety issues, such as not keeping your workplace safe from hazards. It cost more to protect miners from black lung than to replace the dead miners with immigrants.
Slavery was a HUGE example of cutting corners: instead of paying market price for labor, the South enslaved people. As a matter of fact, your goods are transported to you every day on rails laid by many Chinese who died because of their masters' short cutting.
Ever wonder why your Ford breaks down so often? Short cuts in quality control, that's why.
Cutting corners happens with bank network security. Hence, account fraud. Cutting corners in quality control is a huge part of MicroSoft's software design strategy.
Need I point out more examples of how US companies cut corners to maximize short term shareholder returns?
The mass market is about choosing what is the most convenient and most profitable. That almost always means cutting corners to get the job done.
In effect if you can get away with throwing a party and leaving it for someone else to clean up, market rules say you win.
Your James Surowiecki citation leaves out two highly damning issues: a) the majority of Germans decided that killing Jews was OK and that the Communist Party really was responsible for the Reichstag fire, even though we all know now that this was horribly wrong.
IOW: If we had, in fact, a totalitarian regime that said "kill no Jews", what do you think would have gone wrong then?
b) Apathy + Wealth = Power. If one of you has the wealth and the polluting smokestacks, and 10 scientists oppose you, their 10 to your 1 says they should win. But then again, there's also 100 million people that don't care, so you can overwhelm those 10 scientists with a media blitz. Especially if you own the TV network. Does this ever really happen? Yes it does.
BTW there is a middle ground between totalitarianism by the minority and what we have now: that middle ground is called eloquence and a sense of leadership. Unfortunately that is also stifled because the public is not only apathetic, but also anti-intellectual...
"I think you may not have caught my point. If the laws of supply and demand aren't interfered with by government regulation, then you get what you want."
And if the scientists happen to know that what people want is going to kill them and the market ignores the scientists, the minority of people who want change will be punished with pain, suffering and even death, because of the way the actions of the ignorant majority dictate the actions of the market.
This is going on right now with regards to pollution, which is quite related to our energy supply problems.
Econ 101 supports what I just said. Real life also supports it. Go outside and look at the smog hanging over every major city. Go check the city's drinking water. Then tell me which Econ 101 factoid refutes the danger that pollution represents to everyone who lives under that smog and drinks that water.
I could show you the testimony of doctors and scientists whose research shows that smog is hurting people, but you would claim Econ 101 refutes them. After all, if the market doesn't care about smog, and only Government regulations care, then by your logic the scientists are wrong and pollution is perfectly okay because the market has decided it's not worth dealing with.
The law of supply and demand are utterly irrelevant here.
"That is the free market at work. People unhappy about a company or a product have much more of a voice with the web being so readily available. The more the Internet allows billions of citizens to align on different issues, the more we'll see that a free market "democracy" is better than a democracy built around the use of force."
The problem is that some of the most egregious violations of freedom are protected by apathy.
For instance, the fact that your personal information is for sale to the highest bidding criminal OVERSEAS...
"But pricing will take care of this. And this is very basic economics. It involves the laws of supply and demand. As the supply of the resource decreases, it's cost will increase past the cost of the next best alternative. At which point, everyone will stop using that resource. In other words, we will never (ever) run out of oil. It will, at some point before we run out, become to expensive to use. So no one will use it. No government regulation required."
But many lives will needlessly be lost due to energy shortages (see: heating oil becomes too expensive [that is happening now], food becomes too expensive to transport cheaply [is this inevitable?]) and air and water will be needlessly polluted while the free market waits for reality to correct its wasteful, polluting ways.
Your holy mantra of waiting for the market to correct everything is as evil and devastating to society as trusting EVERYTHING to the Government. Hell, why not just let computers rule us and govern our lives by credit and debit projections on a ledger sheet? That is ultimately what "what will the market do?" mentality leads to.
Biased? Okay, fine, I challenge you to show which fact I asserted was untrue.
And who are the Chinese to play GOD and decide who lives and who dies? Your support of their utterly brutal methods of killing their own people off are barbaric, to say the least.
America doesn't need population control to keep its birth rate under control, now does it? Nor do Japan or Europe.
There were better ways for China to control its population. Your "kill the baby girls or everyone starves" argument is horribly off the mark, inhumanly cold blooded
oh wait, cold blooded is ok with you.. the ends justify the means, I suppose. I mean, after all, you got to live, who cares about anyone else, right? Would you be willing to take one for the overpopulated team? I didn't think so...
I'd rather put up with foot binding and forced marriage than not be allowed to live at all.
Life is hard but death is worse. It's sad how today's twisted logic seems to assert the reverse. If death is such a great release from pain then why don't we all kill ourselves right now?
Women have gained a tremendous amount of rights and freedoms? Oh really? How about the right to EXIST? China's One Child Policy results in more female babies being aborted or drowned than in most of the rest of the world combined (except India, perhaps).
Free trade with China makes ALL of us responsible for this tragedy. But hey, as long as your DVD players cost $50 or less, you can argue that that's not true, I suppose.
but she is NOT going to realize that by us judging her to death.
Queen B, some people need to toe the line to survive, others have nothing to lose. I don't know if you have a family to feed or not, but a wo/man is nothing if they sacrifice their family for some "greater" cause. Don't go there.
And remember the four boxes of freedom: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Can YOU get it into your neutronium-reinforced skull that it isn't MicroSoft's products that piss us off as much as their Orwellian attempts at forcing DRM on us? And they also bully hardware manufacturers into not offering drivers for Linux - that they were actually busted for.
Windows is NOT good. They're an enemy of consumer freedom.
Patents #USAPATRIOT666 and #COPA101: using "it's for the safety of our citizens/children" as justification for controlling the population.
Re:OK, that's obvious on the surface...
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The H-1B Swindle
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· Score: 1
And when Americans spend less because they earn less in your fantasy world, tough luck when your business goes under or your employer lays you off and hands their CEO a golden parachute while whining about lost sales. Life is unfair, after all.
Ok, so I'm supposed to BUY your products?
on
The H-1B Swindle
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· Score: 1
Your comment about "lack of skill" is complete horseshit. And if you're going to go on about paying your employees less, then don't whine when they spend less and you find your business in bankruptcy.
Consumer spending is 2/3 of the economy and lowering their wages has a direct and immediate effect on corporate profits, especially now that the bankruptcy laws have changed.
If you pay people less then where will they get the money to buy your products and services? Simple question, you should be able to answer it.
Lots of Democrats favored middle class tax cuts. Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 are two examples. As for connections, how do you get much of anything in life now without connections? Hello, professional and personal references, anyone? It starts there and gets far more complex with acting. But still, connections are fairly useless in Hollywood without talent.
And how do you think those overpaid CEOs get positions where they get multimillion dollar golden parachutes even as they are dragging their companies into the dirt? Pure merit? Hardly, unless one defines merit as "bankrupting a company".
And here's a hint for conservatives who want anything in life, period: consumers create businesses. If you want consumers you better encourage them to spend and not hoard up their money in fear of being laid off and left to fend for themselves against $5/day competition abroad and crushing medical bills. I guarantee you that people are and will be spending less nowadays thanks to conservative economics especially that new bankruptcy law. Kiss the plastic nation goodbye. Kiss a big chunk of consumer spending goodbye. And guess what gets kissed goodbye next? Jobs AND businesses.
Oh I forgot.. corporate bankruptcies are on the general rise. But as long as there's a liberal alive I bet they'll be to blame. Conservatives do no wrong, nosireebobski.
Ah hah. So the Hollywood liberals who came from nothing and who made millions in acting, inherited their money? Tell me, exactly who did Whoopi Goldberg inherit her wealth from? Oh I get it, she inherited a wealth of talents genetically. I see. Oh and exactly what king's ransom did Hillary Clinton inherit?
As for liberals wanting government programs - wrong. They want more middle class jobs. I guess that is further proof of "not wanting anyone else to get theirs". Neo cons support offshoring which takes away mostly middle class jobs and not poor low paying service sector jobs.
Liberals want to protect the middle class jobs we had. Conservatives want them to go overseas so we can have "faith based employment" - aka, we pray for a new middle class jobs-creating industry to come along and then pray some more when it doesn't.
Democrats push for middle class tax cuts while majority Republicans consistently nip it in the bud and then erroneously blame Democrats for it.
The "I've got mine, I don't wany anyone else getting theirs" is far more a Republican thing than a Democrat thing.
Then someone please explain to me the so-called scourge of rich liberals, aka "limousine" liberals, and why liberal-dominated Blue states are typically richer than conservative-dominated "red states"?
Your simple minded "the poor put themselves in that place" is does not explain the limousine liberal effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Opera messed itself up by selling their web browser at first. People saw FireFox and perceived it to be far better than IE, and at least "good enough" against Opera, and FireFox was free, so there you go.
You are SO going to Guantanamo... :)
How does asking about linux support for a new piece of hardware become flamebait?
Someone please, PLEASE explain this to me.
I did address your points; you just didn't like the fact that I didn't agree.
Second of all, when it comes to discussing cutting corners, you know exactly what I meant. You're just resorting to delay and confuse tactics now. I meant cutting corners as in ignoring things like safety issues, such as not keeping your workplace safe from hazards. It cost more to protect miners from black lung than to replace the dead miners with immigrants.
Slavery was a HUGE example of cutting corners: instead of paying market price for labor, the South enslaved people. As a matter of fact, your goods are transported to you every day on rails laid by many Chinese who died because of their masters' short cutting.
Ever wonder why your Ford breaks down so often? Short cuts in quality control, that's why.
Cutting corners happens with bank network security. Hence, account fraud. Cutting corners in quality control is a huge part of MicroSoft's software design strategy.
Need I point out more examples of how US companies cut corners to maximize short term shareholder returns?
The mass market is about choosing what is the most convenient and most profitable. That almost always means cutting corners to get the job done.
In effect if you can get away with throwing a party and leaving it for someone else to clean up, market rules say you win.
Your James Surowiecki citation leaves out two highly damning issues:
a) the majority of Germans decided that killing Jews was OK and that the Communist Party really was responsible for the Reichstag fire, even though we all know now that this was horribly wrong.
IOW: If we had, in fact, a totalitarian regime that said "kill no Jews", what do you think would have gone wrong then?
b) Apathy + Wealth = Power. If one of you has the wealth and the polluting smokestacks, and 10 scientists oppose you, their 10 to your 1 says they should win. But then again, there's also 100 million people that don't care, so you can overwhelm those 10 scientists with a media blitz. Especially if you own the TV network. Does this ever really happen? Yes it does.
c) More about apathy.
BTW there is a middle ground between totalitarianism by the minority and what we have now: that middle ground is called eloquence and a sense of leadership. Unfortunately that is also stifled because the public is not only apathetic, but also anti-intellectual...
"I think you may not have caught my point. If the laws of supply and demand aren't interfered with by government regulation, then you get what you want."
And if the scientists happen to know that what people want is going to kill them and the market ignores the scientists, the minority of people who want change will be punished with pain, suffering and even death, because of the way the actions of the ignorant majority dictate the actions of the market.
This is going on right now with regards to pollution, which is quite related to our energy supply problems.
Econ 101 supports what I just said. Real life also supports it. Go outside and look at the smog hanging over every major city. Go check the city's drinking water. Then tell me which Econ 101 factoid refutes the danger that pollution represents to everyone who lives under that smog and drinks that water.
I could show you the testimony of doctors and scientists whose research shows that smog is hurting people, but you would claim Econ 101 refutes them. After all, if the market doesn't care about smog, and only Government regulations care, then by your logic the scientists are wrong and pollution is perfectly okay because the market has decided it's not worth dealing with.
The law of supply and demand are utterly irrelevant here.
"That is the free market at work. People unhappy about a company or a product have much more of a voice with the web being so readily available. The more the Internet allows billions of citizens to align on different issues, the more we'll see that a free market "democracy" is better than a democracy built around the use of force."
The problem is that some of the most egregious violations of freedom are protected by apathy.
For instance, the fact that your personal information is for sale to the highest bidding criminal OVERSEAS...
"But pricing will take care of this. And this is very basic economics. It involves the laws of supply and demand. As the supply of the resource decreases, it's cost will increase past the cost of the next best alternative. At which point, everyone will stop using that resource. In other words, we will never (ever) run out of oil. It will, at some point before we run out, become to expensive to use. So no one will use it. No government regulation required."
But many lives will needlessly be lost due to energy shortages (see: heating oil becomes too expensive [that is happening now], food becomes too expensive to transport cheaply [is this inevitable?]) and air and water will be needlessly polluted while the free market waits for reality to correct its wasteful, polluting ways.
Your holy mantra of waiting for the market to correct everything is as evil and devastating to society as trusting EVERYTHING to the Government. Hell, why not just let computers rule us and govern our lives by credit and debit projections on a ledger sheet? That is ultimately what "what will the market do?" mentality leads to.
GarageBand and/or Reason for Windows or GNU/Linux?
It would be nice to know of equivalents that you don't have to pay an arm and a leg for.
Small problem: We can hit China and India from space before they even know what's coming.
For now.
Biased? Okay, fine, I challenge you to show which fact I asserted was untrue.
.. the ends justify the means, I suppose. I mean, after all, you got to live, who cares about anyone else, right? Would you be willing to take one for the overpopulated team? I didn't think so...
And who are the Chinese to play GOD and decide who lives and who dies? Your support of their utterly brutal methods of killing their own people off are barbaric, to say the least.
America doesn't need population control to keep its birth rate under control, now does it? Nor do Japan or Europe.
There were better ways for China to control its population. Your "kill the baby girls or everyone starves" argument is horribly off the mark, inhumanly cold blooded
oh wait, cold blooded is ok with you
I'd rather put up with foot binding and forced marriage than not be allowed to live at all.
Life is hard but death is worse. It's sad how today's twisted logic seems to assert the reverse. If death is such a great release from pain then why don't we all kill ourselves right now?
Women have gained a tremendous amount of rights and freedoms? Oh really? How about the right to EXIST? China's One Child Policy results in more female babies being aborted or drowned than in most of the rest of the world combined (except India, perhaps).
I CLE_ID=39475
9 .htm6 32-4101r.htm
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
Wanna know what the murder of girl babies in China has resulted in?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/omicinski/06
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20040308-092
Free trade with China makes ALL of us responsible for this tragedy. But hey, as long as your DVD players cost $50 or less, you can argue that that's not true, I suppose.
but she is NOT going to realize that by us judging her to death.
Queen B, some people need to toe the line to survive, others have nothing to lose. I don't know if you have a family to feed or not, but a wo/man is nothing if they sacrifice their family for some "greater" cause. Don't go there.
And remember the four boxes of freedom: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
max born, you're so right on the mark it's phenomenal. I don't want Government OR corporations stockpiling my personal information without my consent.
Can YOU get it into your neutronium-reinforced skull that it isn't MicroSoft's products that piss us off as much as their Orwellian attempts at forcing DRM on us? And they also bully hardware manufacturers into not offering drivers for Linux - that they were actually busted for.
Windows is NOT good. They're an enemy of consumer freedom.
Now "bigotry" that.
NOT!!
but in the future, as a hydrogen infrastructure matures, the electricity will come from some hydrogen based generator.
Patents #USAPATRIOT666 and #COPA101: using "it's for the safety of our citizens/children" as justification for controlling the population.
And when Americans spend less because they earn less in your fantasy world, tough luck when your business goes under or your employer lays you off and hands their CEO a golden parachute while whining about lost sales. Life is unfair, after all.
Your comment about "lack of skill" is complete horseshit. And if you're going to go on about paying your employees less, then don't whine when they spend less and you find your business in bankruptcy.
Consumer spending is 2/3 of the economy and lowering their wages has a direct and immediate effect on corporate profits, especially now that the bankruptcy laws have changed.
If you pay people less then where will they get the money to buy your products and services? Simple question, you should be able to answer it.
Lots of Democrats favored middle class tax cuts. Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 are two examples. As for connections, how do you get much of anything in life now without connections? Hello, professional and personal references, anyone? It starts there and gets far more complex with acting. But still, connections are fairly useless in Hollywood without talent.
And how do you think those overpaid CEOs get positions where they get multimillion dollar golden parachutes even as they are dragging their companies into the dirt? Pure merit? Hardly, unless one defines merit as "bankrupting a company".
And here's a hint for conservatives who want anything in life, period: consumers create businesses. If you want consumers you better encourage them to spend and not hoard up their money in fear of being laid off and left to fend for themselves against $5/day competition abroad and crushing medical bills. I guarantee you that people are and will be spending less nowadays thanks to conservative economics especially that new bankruptcy law. Kiss the plastic nation goodbye. Kiss a big chunk of consumer spending goodbye. And guess what gets kissed goodbye next? Jobs AND businesses.
Oh I forgot.. corporate bankruptcies are on the general rise. But as long as there's a liberal alive I bet they'll be to blame. Conservatives do no wrong, nosireebobski.
Ah hah. So the Hollywood liberals who came from nothing and who made millions in acting, inherited their money? Tell me, exactly who did Whoopi Goldberg inherit her wealth from? Oh I get it, she inherited a wealth of talents genetically. I see. Oh and exactly what king's ransom did Hillary Clinton inherit?
As for liberals wanting government programs - wrong. They want more middle class jobs. I guess that is further proof of "not wanting anyone else to get theirs". Neo cons support offshoring which takes away mostly middle class jobs and not poor low paying service sector jobs.
Liberals want to protect the middle class jobs we had. Conservatives want them to go overseas so we can have "faith based employment" - aka, we pray for a new middle class jobs-creating industry to come along and then pray some more when it doesn't.
Democrats push for middle class tax cuts while majority Republicans consistently nip it in the bud and then erroneously blame Democrats for it.
The "I've got mine, I don't wany anyone else getting theirs" is far more a Republican thing than a Democrat thing.
Then someone please explain to me the so-called scourge of rich liberals, aka "limousine" liberals, and why liberal-dominated Blue states are typically richer than conservative-dominated "red states"?
Your simple minded "the poor put themselves in that place" is does not explain the limousine liberal effect.
Someone mod the parent up