[Apple]...but otherwise things run pretty smoothly, usability is first and 99.9999% of users don't need to rely on a "computer friend" to help them out.
Good thing that apple support is free for all things, hardware failures never occur, and they dont need help setting it up. Oh wait, as an IT consultant I have to deal with all of those things... on Macs too. Also, good thing their server offerings are so strong...
[Google]... everywhere but in turn they must be able to access it too for advertising purposes.
I like how you imply all the other search engines (and all other free online services...) including microsoft arent the same. And Ill note that in several of their products (Chrome/ium/OS, Apps, Postini), you can prevent them from collecting any data quite easily (in the case of apps/postini, its by GASP paying for the product).
[Microsoft]...their software is not only really expensive but also not quite stable
Myth, If your Server 2008/Exchange 2010 setup isnt stable youre doing it wrong (and Im not really sure how youd even maange that). Compare its stability to such appliance OSes such as Freenas or pfsense, I think youll find its a hell of a lot MORE stable (since having a USB keyboard plugged into those causes a boot-crash)...
The question is if it has higher thought and self awareness
Has it been shown that newborns know they are babies, or that they are capable of meta-cognition?
And he did not specify "thinking human"; he implied that there was agreement that thats what it means to be human (to have a neocortex), when in fact that is the very core of the debate. Hence why its a "begging the question" fallacy.
You know what makes me scratch my head? When people point at the worlds 4th most popular non-portal website and claim that it is somehow doomed, and was always doomed, in spite of reality-- hasnt it been in the global top 10 for the last 10 years or so?
Wikipedia has its issues, but I dont see it going anywhere; there have been attempts to replace them, but Ill note that they dont ever appear in google results, whereas Wikipedia somehow appears in pretty much EVERY search result.
Wait wait wait, how the hell are you blaming this on republicans? The TSA chief (John Pistole) was nominated by a D president (Obama). The DHS secretary (Janet Nepolitano) is a democrat, also nominated by obama. The current head of the executive is a Democrat. And all of these machines came in under THEIR watch with THEIR approval.
If something were patented it lends some kind of implicit approval to it. It also makes it less profitable to go into it, as noone would have exclusive rights.
Most of what makes a human a human is a functioning neo-cortex. The very first cells that can be traced to the neo-cortex form at around 8 weeks. That's the absolute earliest that it would make sense to define a human
This, folks, is what we call begging the question.
Why do you say that is what makes us human? How are you defining "what a human is"?
You must be correct. Your single unsubstantiated piece of anecdotal evidence supersedes all prior arguments, both proving you correct and disproving all examples I gave in one fell swoop.
It matters not why people didnt support it; the fact is they didnt. The why wasnt relevant to my comment.
And as a side note, there were also people (like myself, and I imagine a significant number of other republicans) who dont really think this is or should be a federal issue; nor that we can really afford socialized medicine right now (though youre welcome to try to convince me that providing government-sponsored healthcare to those who cannot afford it is, in fact, a money generator).
I was just at a brazilian steakhouse a week ago (for the uninitiated, you pay a flat rate, and folks walk by your table and ask if you want this cut of meat or that cut of meat). You think the manager isnt closely watching how much top sirloin your table has consumed? You think he doesnt carefully manage how often that guy makes his rounds past your table, or how hard he pushes you to go for the grilled pineapple?
These are real world, culturally (and legally, I rather suspect) acceptable examples of both throttling and "unlimited" with strings attached. You all need to pull your heads out of the ground if you think any place offers no-strings-attached unlimited anything; capitalism would fall to shambles if such a thing were possible (an infinite supply kills demand and prices).
So we either come up with "make work" to give an excuse to cut these people a check, have massive unemployment and underemployment which will eventually lead to a tipping point and massive civil unrest, or we find a new way (perhaps resource based) to do things
You forgot an important third option-- Or people will retrain to a job that IS needed so that they can pay their bills.
Talking of false equivalency, the ISPs never said "we will never limit or throttle you ever", either. They just said "unlimited", just as a buffet says "all you can eat". That doesnt mean there arent conditions; anyone with a high school education would immediately know that "unlimited" has strings attached just as "all you can eat" does. At the very least, you are limited by your bandwidth, or your appetite; and more practically you are limited by those around you.
All that aside, your original post was way off base, because the situation you described is EXACTLY what happens in the real world at e.g. all-you-can-eat seafood restaurants. Guess what happens when they run out of salmon, or its time to close the restaurant?
Finally, grow up. "I win" statements in an argument dont mean that you "won", it means youre acting like a child.
This is why anecdotal evidence doesnt really work-- He has one experience, you had another, and noone can really discern which is closer to reality from either of you.
- if you want a desktop system that stays out of your way, Just Works, and requires little maintenance beyond letting an auto updater do its thing... Windows or OSX are your only real options
Theres truth to all of what youve said, but youre simplifying things waaay too much. There are times Windows will just refuse to work with a system (ie, shipped with vista, provides no XP drivers, nothing works in XP, and Vista SP2 hasnt shipped yet), and Linux will land you with a beautifully configured and funcitonal system out of the box; there are times, conversely, where nothing you do seems to get Pulse to work with flash, or theres no driver for your wifi card, but Win7 just nails it from the get go.
Ive stopped using Ubuntu for the most part for a few reasons, but the main one was that I used to do a lot of WoW and used ventrilo for it, and one of the upgrades finally stopped working quite right with wine, and I was just tired of having to make each and every proprietary, windows-only thing I did work right on Linux. It was doable, and fun and instructive for a while, but after a while the excitement fades and you tire of pushing so hard against the reality that you really do need Windows-only apps (Evolution's OWA integration SUCKS compared to real MAPI support from Outlook!).
But I can fully envision someone who really does need only the web and a few other things and for them Linux Just Works in a way Windows cant-- fully integrated updates, general freedom from the spectre of malware (the reason is irrelevant)
They'll say, "It's nvidia's fault for not doing X" or "it's your fault because you didn't do Y" or "it's the upstream maintainer's fault because he didn't do Z". Which is, unfortunately, completely missing the point: when you are using a system to get a task done, fault does not matter.
There is a lot of truth to this, but people forget about these incidents on Windows because theyre considered part of what you have to do-- XP didnt come with passable nVidia drivers worth gaming with, nor did Vista; you had to hunt them down and install them. But when you have to do the same on Linux-- which is basically an identical experience with a single binary that you run and does all the work for you-- all of a sudden its "too much of a burden on the user".
Its also worth mentioning that comparing a preinstalled OS with preinstalled drivers to one that you install from disk post-factory is apples-to-oranges-- If / when Linux is preinstalled from an image onto HP or Acer laptops, they wont have driver issues-- they wont ship until they are fixed. See for example the instant-boot varieties like Acer's and HPs preboot web-browsing-only Linux distros-- the wireless works flawlessly on those, because the manufacturer took care of it.
In usability and out-of-box-experience, Windows and Linux (generally) are getting closer and closer; I rather suspect that as that continues, the complaints about Gnome and Ubuntu's changes will be rather more vocal.
Youre also comparing apples to oranges. Drivers are contained in the Linux kernel; they are not contained in the Windows kernel (though windows does prepackage and ship with many drivers in the base install). Windows gets a new version every 3-5 years; Linux distros every 6mos-2 years (sometimes more tho). So Windows is more likely to have out of date or missing drivers... but when both Linux and Windows are missing drivers, Windows is almost always easier to install said driver with-- mainly because Device manager doesnt really have a functional equivalent in Linux that ive found that allows 2 click or 20 second driver installs (if anyone knows of one, Id be interested).
The problem isnt just "not many Linux hardware sellers", either; there are only like 2-3 popular, well tested user-geared distros that Ive seen. The most popular and polished of them, Ubuntu, has a thing for grabbing every bleeding edge innovation it can find and stuffing it into a 6 month integration cycle, and letting users beta test it for a few months after release. Thus you end up with a perfectly fine laptop that a vendor sells working fine on 8.04, but then when he does clean install or upgrade to 8.10, PulseAudio breaks everything. Or the new compositing manager pukes and breaks gnome. Or a change to the wifi drivers broke everything. Or their NIC is blacklisted because of a nasty kernel bug in a just-released kernel (intel E1000?), and they no longer have wired lan.
There are many issues here, and part of it is lack of "critical mass", but part is also that Linux has a lot of areas to improve on, and when youre improving many things at once (ubuntu), things tend to break rapid-fire.
I have bad news for you-- that is what happens in the real world. If you go to a buffet with 20 other friends, and you make it a point to eat all of their tomatoes, I dont think you would be able to sue when they ran out.
We saw how "beholden to their voters" worked out with the healthcare bill-- which a majority of the voters opposed (I dont care what your affiliation is, thats not an ideal scenario). It doesnt always work out as one would hope it would.
Any time you start thinking that the government is less "evil" than corporations, or that corporations are less "evil" than the government, you get onto scary ground. Both are institutions made up by people, and governed by how those people behave. History shows that people collectively will not consistently act in a "good" way, and that the more power they have, the more that tends to show itself.
The correct move is to carefully balance how much power each has to minimize those effects, and not assume one or the other needs to be given gross liberties.
It DOES take a little nerve to insult EA, and then request EA to give you a game to download, please. Id hate for this to be policy, but perhaps the kid will learn a valuable lesson here.
If you just want them for the session, under content settings choose "Clear cookies and other site data when I close my browser"
This isnt really rocket science, a google search would have given you all of this information. I just found this out by getting the gumption up to care for 3 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, If im standing on the sidewalk and you come lumbering down, you have the right to force me to stop standing there? Im confused.
[Apple]...but otherwise things run pretty smoothly, usability is first and 99.9999% of users don't need to rely on a "computer friend" to help them out.
Good thing that apple support is free for all things, hardware failures never occur, and they dont need help setting it up. Oh wait, as an IT consultant I have to deal with all of those things... on Macs too.
Also, good thing their server offerings are so strong...
[Google]... everywhere but in turn they must be able to access it too for advertising purposes.
I like how you imply all the other search engines (and all other free online services...) including microsoft arent the same. And Ill note that in several of their products (Chrome/ium/OS, Apps, Postini), you can prevent them from collecting any data quite easily (in the case of apps/postini, its by GASP paying for the product).
[Microsoft] ...their software is not only really expensive but also not quite stable
Myth, If your Server 2008/Exchange 2010 setup isnt stable youre doing it wrong (and Im not really sure how youd even maange that). Compare its stability to such appliance OSes such as Freenas or pfsense, I think youll find its a hell of a lot MORE stable (since having a USB keyboard plugged into those causes a boot-crash)...
In a court of law, all of what you just said would be called "hearsay" and tossed in the rubbish bin.
The question is if it has higher thought and self awareness
Has it been shown that newborns know they are babies, or that they are capable of meta-cognition?
And he did not specify "thinking human"; he implied that there was agreement that thats what it means to be human (to have a neocortex), when in fact that is the very core of the debate. Hence why its a "begging the question" fallacy.
Keeping vs deleting isnt a false dichotomy, because if you arent deleting it then you must be keeping it. The two are mutually exclusive.[/nitpick]
You know what makes me scratch my head? When people point at the worlds 4th most popular non-portal website and claim that it is somehow doomed, and was always doomed, in spite of reality-- hasnt it been in the global top 10 for the last 10 years or so?
Wikipedia has its issues, but I dont see it going anywhere; there have been attempts to replace them, but Ill note that they dont ever appear in google results, whereas Wikipedia somehow appears in pretty much EVERY search result.
Or your off-duty TSA agent wasnt telling you the truth, or his trainers werent following the official procedure, or you misheard...
The possibilities are endless...
Wait wait wait, how the hell are you blaming this on republicans? The TSA chief (John Pistole) was nominated by a D president (Obama). The DHS secretary (Janet Nepolitano) is a democrat, also nominated by obama. The current head of the executive is a Democrat. And all of these machines came in under THEIR watch with THEIR approval.
Where do the republicans come into this again?
If something were patented it lends some kind of implicit approval to it. It also makes it less profitable to go into it, as noone would have exclusive rights.
Most of what makes a human a human is a functioning neo-cortex. The very first cells that can be traced to the neo-cortex form at around 8 weeks. That's the absolute earliest that it would make sense to define a human
This, folks, is what we call begging the question.
Why do you say that is what makes us human? How are you defining "what a human is"?
You must be correct. Your single unsubstantiated piece of anecdotal evidence supersedes all prior arguments, both proving you correct and disproving all examples I gave in one fell swoop.
It matters not why people didnt support it; the fact is they didnt. The why wasnt relevant to my comment.
And as a side note, there were also people (like myself, and I imagine a significant number of other republicans) who dont really think this is or should be a federal issue; nor that we can really afford socialized medicine right now (though youre welcome to try to convince me that providing government-sponsored healthcare to those who cannot afford it is, in fact, a money generator).
I was just at a brazilian steakhouse a week ago (for the uninitiated, you pay a flat rate, and folks walk by your table and ask if you want this cut of meat or that cut of meat). You think the manager isnt closely watching how much top sirloin your table has consumed? You think he doesnt carefully manage how often that guy makes his rounds past your table, or how hard he pushes you to go for the grilled pineapple?
These are real world, culturally (and legally, I rather suspect) acceptable examples of both throttling and "unlimited" with strings attached. You all need to pull your heads out of the ground if you think any place offers no-strings-attached unlimited anything; capitalism would fall to shambles if such a thing were possible (an infinite supply kills demand and prices).
So we either come up with "make work" to give an excuse to cut these people a check, have massive unemployment and underemployment which will eventually lead to a tipping point and massive civil unrest, or we find a new way (perhaps resource based) to do things
You forgot an important third option-- Or people will retrain to a job that IS needed so that they can pay their bills.
Talking of false equivalency, the ISPs never said "we will never limit or throttle you ever", either. They just said "unlimited", just as a buffet says "all you can eat". That doesnt mean there arent conditions; anyone with a high school education would immediately know that "unlimited" has strings attached just as "all you can eat" does. At the very least, you are limited by your bandwidth, or your appetite; and more practically you are limited by those around you.
All that aside, your original post was way off base, because the situation you described is EXACTLY what happens in the real world at e.g. all-you-can-eat seafood restaurants. Guess what happens when they run out of salmon, or its time to close the restaurant?
Finally, grow up. "I win" statements in an argument dont mean that you "won", it means youre acting like a child.
This is why anecdotal evidence doesnt really work-- He has one experience, you had another, and noone can really discern which is closer to reality from either of you.
- if you want a desktop system that stays out of your way, Just Works, and requires little maintenance beyond letting an auto updater do its thing... Windows or OSX are your only real options
Theres truth to all of what youve said, but youre simplifying things waaay too much. There are times Windows will just refuse to work with a system (ie, shipped with vista, provides no XP drivers, nothing works in XP, and Vista SP2 hasnt shipped yet), and Linux will land you with a beautifully configured and funcitonal system out of the box; there are times, conversely, where nothing you do seems to get Pulse to work with flash, or theres no driver for your wifi card, but Win7 just nails it from the get go.
Ive stopped using Ubuntu for the most part for a few reasons, but the main one was that I used to do a lot of WoW and used ventrilo for it, and one of the upgrades finally stopped working quite right with wine, and I was just tired of having to make each and every proprietary, windows-only thing I did work right on Linux. It was doable, and fun and instructive for a while, but after a while the excitement fades and you tire of pushing so hard against the reality that you really do need Windows-only apps (Evolution's OWA integration SUCKS compared to real MAPI support from Outlook!).
But I can fully envision someone who really does need only the web and a few other things and for them Linux Just Works in a way Windows cant-- fully integrated updates, general freedom from the spectre of malware (the reason is irrelevant)
They'll say, "It's nvidia's fault for not doing X" or "it's your fault because you didn't do Y" or "it's the upstream maintainer's fault because he didn't do Z". Which is, unfortunately, completely missing the point: when you are using a system to get a task done, fault does not matter.
There is a lot of truth to this, but people forget about these incidents on Windows because theyre considered part of what you have to do-- XP didnt come with passable nVidia drivers worth gaming with, nor did Vista; you had to hunt them down and install them. But when you have to do the same on Linux-- which is basically an identical experience with a single binary that you run and does all the work for you-- all of a sudden its "too much of a burden on the user".
Its also worth mentioning that comparing a preinstalled OS with preinstalled drivers to one that you install from disk post-factory is apples-to-oranges-- If / when Linux is preinstalled from an image onto HP or Acer laptops, they wont have driver issues-- they wont ship until they are fixed. See for example the instant-boot varieties like Acer's and HPs preboot web-browsing-only Linux distros-- the wireless works flawlessly on those, because the manufacturer took care of it.
In usability and out-of-box-experience, Windows and Linux (generally) are getting closer and closer; I rather suspect that as that continues, the complaints about Gnome and Ubuntu's changes will be rather more vocal.
Youre also comparing apples to oranges. Drivers are contained in the Linux kernel; they are not contained in the Windows kernel (though windows does prepackage and ship with many drivers in the base install). Windows gets a new version every 3-5 years; Linux distros every 6mos-2 years (sometimes more tho). So Windows is more likely to have out of date or missing drivers... but when both Linux and Windows are missing drivers, Windows is almost always easier to install said driver with-- mainly because Device manager doesnt really have a functional equivalent in Linux that ive found that allows 2 click or 20 second driver installs (if anyone knows of one, Id be interested).
The problem isnt just "not many Linux hardware sellers", either; there are only like 2-3 popular, well tested user-geared distros that Ive seen.
The most popular and polished of them, Ubuntu, has a thing for grabbing every bleeding edge innovation it can find and stuffing it into a 6 month integration cycle, and letting users beta test it for a few months after release. Thus you end up with a perfectly fine laptop that a vendor sells working fine on 8.04, but then when he does clean install or upgrade to 8.10, PulseAudio breaks everything. Or the new compositing manager pukes and breaks gnome. Or a change to the wifi drivers broke everything. Or their NIC is blacklisted because of a nasty kernel bug in a just-released kernel (intel E1000?), and they no longer have wired lan.
There are many issues here, and part of it is lack of "critical mass", but part is also that Linux has a lot of areas to improve on, and when youre improving many things at once (ubuntu), things tend to break rapid-fire.
I have bad news for you-- that is what happens in the real world. If you go to a buffet with 20 other friends, and you make it a point to eat all of their tomatoes, I dont think you would be able to sue when they ran out.
I hope thats not a dichotomy youre driving at.
We saw how "beholden to their voters" worked out with the healthcare bill-- which a majority of the voters opposed (I dont care what your affiliation is, thats not an ideal scenario). It doesnt always work out as one would hope it would.
Any time you start thinking that the government is less "evil" than corporations, or that corporations are less "evil" than the government, you get onto scary ground. Both are institutions made up by people, and governed by how those people behave. History shows that people collectively will not consistently act in a "good" way, and that the more power they have, the more that tends to show itself.
The correct move is to carefully balance how much power each has to minimize those effects, and not assume one or the other needs to be given gross liberties.
I see no reason why being able to refuse to serve customers is a bad thing.
It DOES take a little nerve to insult EA, and then request EA to give you a game to download, please. Id hate for this to be policy, but perhaps the kid will learn a valuable lesson here.
If you just want them for the session, under content settings choose "Clear cookies and other site data when I close my browser"
This isnt really rocket science, a google search would have given you all of this information. I just found this out by getting the gumption up to care for 3 minutes.