Yeah, government can guarantee any and every single thing it wants - it doesn't have to make money. All this is good until it crashes the economy with its weight and then the guarantees will mean nothing. Who cares that you'll get your check and your paper money if they buy nothing?
Let's see how the government 'guarantee' is working out for the housing market and price stability and SS and minimum wage and Medicare/Medicaid and safety and the value of the dollar itself.
What did Ben say when asked by Ron Paul about the definition of the dollar? Oooh, yeah, he said:
My definition of the dollar is what it can buy. Consumers donâ(TM)t want to buy gold; they want to buy food, and gasoline, and clothes and all the other things that are in the consumer basket. It is the buying power of the dollar in terms of those goods and services that is what is important, and thatâ(TM)s what I call price stability.
Right. So the dollar "is what it buys".
However there is an action definition of the dollar, as it was stated by the Coinage Act of 1792, and it's not some hand waiving.
The dollar is supposed to be a unit of weight of gold or silver defined like this:
371 4/16 grain (24.1 g) pure or 416 grain (27.0 g) standard silver.
$10 is 247 4/8 grain (16.0 g) pure or 270 grain (17.5 g) standard gold.
--
So excuse me if I do not believe in any government guarantees.
If you take your dollar to the Federal reserve bank you are NOT going to get 27g of pure silver, and for your 10 dollars you will not get 17.5g standard gold.
Government that prints money and guarantees stuff ends up destroying its economy and society.
About half as much as was created via all that government intervention.
- this is called inflation, son. When government does something and GDP grows, that's because they have printed so much money, that prices doubled.
You can call it growth, I call it destruction of the economy.
GDP growing in nominal terms means just the number is going up. The actual value of money falling, that's the real fact. Since 1913 the Fed printed so much money, that the value of dollar fell by 99% since then.
Even just since 2003, the dollar lost 3/4 of value, so when the Fed prints money and prices rise and GDP 'increases' because of that, while people are using credit to buy things that are rising in price due to the inflation of the money supply, this does nothing good for the economy.
Real good would be to let the economy operate on its own (like it mostly did in USA in 19 century) and let the prices fall.
Yes, falling prices are much better for quality of life, when they are brought upon by competition and increased business activity. That's what USA had and that's what was destroyed by the government starting from 1913 (Fed/IRS) and then further, once the minimum wage and SS and FDIC and Medicare/Medicaid and the military industrial complex were introduced. The subsidies to businesses, subsidies to voters, all the business regulations, price controls, exchange controls, getting off of the gold standard and printing printing printing.
You can call it GDP growth that everything is going up in price. I call it inflation and it's bad for economy and it's destroying US economy and economies of other Western nations.
The Asian economies are producing, so at least while they are following the footsteps of the US (sure, it still has the reserve currency), they are actually increasing their manufacturing and agriculture and mining sectors, while the unproductive economies of the West only grow government and financial and service sectors. Those are not productive, those do not actually increase GDP, but hey, all that money that went into bailing out the banks - that increased GDP.
Yeah, bailing out the banks increased GDP. What good did it do to the economy? It just brought the ultimate collapse closer, as the economy was not let restructure and the debts became bigger and the resources and credit are still mis-allocated.
Yeah, the GDP grew with all that nonsense of government printing and spending. Too bad GDP means nothing good for the economy when it's grown by the government.
that's actually nonsense. How much wealth is destroyed via all that government intervention? When the highways were built, all that rail track that was removed, how much GDP did that cost? All that oil that then needed to be bought and refined and just burned to run the inefficient vehicles, how much real GDP did that cost?
Neither, I'm providing a factual description for those reading along that might not be familiar with Unity
- you are arguing for unity in my thread for those, who are unfamiliar with it and you are replying to my comments to do so?
Here is what I think about unity: vomit.
- I found out they are going to remove the classic desktop and I won't have the choice, I so I am moving to something else, yes.
Because you choose to download and install an operating system which prominently presents it as the default UI.
- now here you are misleading any potential reader.
I used Ubuntu for years, so with the new update to one machine I did NOT expect this change at all.
The other machine was given to me as a gift with Ubuntu pre-installed, I switched it to Debian already.
No, what Canonical is doing is underhanded and stealthy when applied to the existing user base. I am not interested in their new big idea of how to use a graphical desktop, I was never interested in it. If Ubuntu had Unity when I first was choosing the distro, I would have gone with Slackware back then.
The launcher bar more like a menu than a "memory paging algorithm" (I don't even get what you are trying to get at with your description.)
- you don't understand? Paging - keeping the last used memory in closest buffer (RAM for example) because if it was used recently, there is a higher chance it will be used again sooner than other memory, that wasn't used recently.
Anyway, good luck with your educational comments there.
Um, the battery power and network status icons are on the top bar, not gotten rid of.
- it was gone on my machines.
The only different thing is that, if its an application you have a permanent launcher icon for, that's the same icon you'd use to launch if it weren't already open.
- the ONLY difference?:) It kills it for me dead.
That "crazy search menu" is a menu tree that also has a keyboard input area. So, no, the idea of a menu tree is not gone, just evolved.
Run any app that doesn't have a permanent launch bar icon and you'll see a new launch icon in the bar, and when you minimize that app, that new icon will stay there.
- wow. Are you trying to sell it to me or are you trying to make me puke, because I am getting nauseous.
The new icon will also have an arrow on the left, just like every icon for a running app, whether minimized or not. That arrow indicates that its a running app.
- so it destroys my normal tree menu, it's not even a menu, just a memory paging algorithm applied for no reason other than to show that the developer knew something about it?
IMO, its an elegant combination of functions that makes a few changes to traditional desktop GUI to present information better.
- and I am telling you it's not better, it is terrible.
Obviously, the original motivation was limited real estate netbook screens and limited precision touch and touchpad interfaces
- so why is it the default for my desktop?
but honestly I think its (despite some wrinkles that still need to be addressed) a better basic approach than the UIs it replaces.
- oh, it replaces alright, it replaces itself from my computer.
Get rid of government involvement, stop giving preferential treatment to some companies over others with special tax laws, etc., level the playing field, get rid of the income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, all taxes that are based on income and only tax vices/some imports and have government feed of that, forbid the government from ever participating in economy, from making any economic decisions, from printing fiat currency, from borrowing money (in fact make sure that government officials cannot get any salaries at all if they can't balance the budget and live within the means allocated to them by the market through certain types of sales taxes) - this way there will be no motive to even attempt and bribe the government, if the government is only there to do basic military protection and provide the justice system, stop all government regulations, repeal all laws and close down all government departments, get rid of all social agenda ideas, get rid of wars... start paying out the debt partially, pay out something like 20 cents on the dollar, but make it known that that's what it will be, the rest will be a loss to the creditors.
That's what it would take to actually restructure the economy and start real competition that would actually allow prices to come down and the economy to pick up.
Are you saying it is a good thing that government stepped in with government money then? I do not consider it to be a good thing, you see? It was not a good thing - there must be legitimate demand for an industry to appear, because industry must become profitable and thus viable without taxation. It must be profitable all on its own.
You do realize that the air travel was very expensive for a very long time even in USA and it became affordable only with massive amounts of competition that came about due to massive lobbying of the government?
There is a very legitimate reason to have uncertainty and risk - government cannot remove risk. Any such idea that government actually removes risk is just another step to a disaster of the magnitude of the housing and banking crisis (and now the currency crisis and the upcoming hyper inflationary depression that will be combined with ridiculously low employment opportunities) because government does not actually assess risk and it does not INVEST money, it does not hedge. It does not invest money to have a fund.
For example SS or Medicare/Medicaid, those are welfare programs, because there was never a fund (even though it was sold to the US public as if there was a fund) but the fund consisted of a check written by government to itself (that's what yields and bonds and notes are), and the money was spent immediately.
It is as if I wrote myself a check for a million dollars and put it into a bank and said I was a millionaire. It did not change my financial situation, but it did use an accounting trick to pretend there was something there, which wasn't actually there.
Any government involvement is destructive to the market, because government involvement equates to inflation and inflation destroys savings, which means it pushes savings and investment out, to other economies, and this in turn destroys the productivity and jobs, which means that the circle closes, since the fewer jobs there are, the more money is printed (and borrowed) by the government, which promises people bread and circuses to continue.
I am starting to wonder exactly which versions of Ubuntu you have had and now have. The movement of the buttons from the right to the left has been in Ubuntu since 10.10 (might even have been 10.04).
- I know. I am just pointing out that the interface is changing to something I do not want to use. That little change with the minimize/maximize/close buttons was really irrelevant, I switched it back immediately, but I remembered it. I remembered that the interface started changing that way, started moving things around that should not have been moved (by default at least) and to me this was notable enough, I was expecting more of the like to continue, but I honestly did not expect what I saw with Unity to happen that quickly.
I did not expect Unity at all.
Maybe what really bugs me is that Unity became the default, rather than being some option, advertised by the company as a feature that could be turned on - this I can definitely support. Sure, have at it, go nuts. As long as I am not forced into this and it is not made the default behavior, I wouldn't be bothered.
But as with the minimize/maximize/close buttons, this Unity thing did become the default. It was forced upon me. It was given to me as a matter of fact. It was NOT something I wanted, it was contrary to what I wanted.
If Ubuntu was using Unity back when I started using the distro, I would not have started, I would not have chosen it to be my desktop, do you see what I am saying? I would have been on something else all this time and never would have used Ubuntu.
The button doesn't act as a maximization button. If the application isn't running, it starts it. If it is running, but not in focus, it brings it to focus. If it is running and is in focus, it makes all of the application's windows available for selection.
- I don't think you are following me. I am not interested in shifting the paradigm of my desktop. I am even less interested in somebody shifting that paradigm for me by force.
Basically this is the beginning of the end of me using the distro the way things are going.
This borrows a lot from OSX.
- obviously. And I don't use OSX because I don't like it, and I don't like Unity (now I know I don't like it, good thing I found out now and didn't wait for an LTS version that pushed this onto me all of a sudden.)
- what are you trying to say? The airlines were taxed severely by FDR while he was also busy taking down rail road tracks to lay his highway system.
He basically destroyed the profitability of both systems of transportation (as well as the public transportation within city limits) to create this unsustainable system of roads, which also gave the government leverage against local governments.
When you say that government 'saved' the air travel, you are forgetting who was the real cause of the rise of terrorism in the world - all of the foreign policy stuff, that USA was/is conducting is to attempt and control the oil reserves, which would not even be necessary if there was no huge subsidy to the auto-industry with all that interstate highway system.
Also do not forget, that the government (FAA), destroys efficiencies in the system - for example regulating air routes, not letting foreign carriers to operate within US borders for local travel, so a plane that lands comes from abroad and lands in New York and then lands in LA cannot take on domestic passengers from New York and bring them to LA, etc.
- silver, gold, cotton, wheat, pork bellies, concentrated orange juice, copper, land for agriculture, oil, gas, uranium, etc. - those things are real.
Dollars are not real.
Yes, I consider silver to be real money, I consider gold to be real money, etc. I also do not consider dollars to be real money (or ANY fiat currency for that matter, though relative to each other some do better and some do worse, but they are all fiat and all are printed at the whim of a politician, none of them are money.)
Silver, gold, etc. - they are stores of value, they can be easily used as units of account and means of trade. They are valuable because of their various properties. Gold is money because it is rare enough, it can't be printed, it does not change over time, it can be reclaimed from any industrial use, it can be easily tested to be real or not, it is accepted as money and has been accepted as money (means of trade) for thousands of years nearly universally.
Gold does not need to be made 'legal tender', it is money on its own, without any government stating it to be so. Of-course people can use all sorts of things for barter, it doesn't have to be gold. But as long as government cannot print the stuff that you use as money, it's already better than fiat paper.
It was worth more in 1980 then it is now--are we on the right track?
- relative to what?
Do you realize that today oil is the CHEAPEST it has EVER been?
If you have a silver dime minted prior to 1965 that is, then oil is the cheapest. In US dollars the silver coin is not the most expensive as you are pointing out, but in oil it is the most expensive and oil is the cheapest. You can buy a gallon of gas for a silver dime minted prior to 1965. With US dollars you have to spend how much? 4 dollars, soon to be 5?
On the other hand, the medications that are currently keeping me alive didn't exist, at any weight of silver, gold, or unobtanium, in the fifties and sixties.I had a smallpox shot back in those halcyon days of economic splendor, a shot that my children didn't need.
- good for you. The reason for the increased innovation is capitalism and industrialization and not fiat money though. It is reliance on under-utilization, savings and real money that made it possible in the 19th century to build the economy, that allowed such concentration of wealth that pushed innovation forward. It was not fiat money that caused your medication to appear, it's the real capitalism - based on savings and re-investment. And real capitalism that is based on savings exists despite the fiat money, not because of it.
Capitalism is based on savings and investment and fiat punishes anybody who is trying to save (in fiat currency). The only way to save is to have real assets that appreciate in currency that is being debased by the government. The only real investment comes out of the savings (capital) and the only way to save is not to be in fiat, which is printed every day by politicians, who want to buy your vote for giving you 'free stuff'.
Do you really believe that people command 1/26 of the spending power their parents did, just because the price of silver has changed by that much?
- yes.
Yes.
How else do you think it was possible for a man to support a family - a house wife and a bunch of kids, to own a house and maybe a boat and maybe another property and a couple of cars and be debt free before 1971? It was because the purchasing power was that much bigger. Was it precisely 26 times greater than? Nothing is exactly precisely 100%, but today people own mortgages, not houses, they don't have a bunch of kids and the wife is working too (and maybe there is a second job, who knows) and they still can't afford all that stuff they want and they don't see their kids enough to be able to raise them properly.
Profitable private rail? The private rail that was built on massive amounts of federal land, and supported through government strike-breaking? That private rail?
- yes, that private profitable rail, and I absolutely agree with you, the government acted criminally by supporting anybody, including the rail tycoons. But by the time we are talking about the rail was private and profitable and it was efficient, roads were not.
Do you honestly think that there is no demand for air travel?
- first, the successful airplanes were created privately. Those, who had government funding (I am thinking about the Aerodrome fiasco) failed. Those who got the planes to fly successfully, did it on their own.
Any government money was not needed to have commercial air travel. Commercial air travel was going to happen. The same may be true of space, but it's not the time yet.
And yes, your argument is that people like things for free. Do you know why? Because there is demand, which is willingness to put the money where the mouth is, which really means WORK, because money is expression of work. Money that is printed by government is not about work, it's about taxing the existing money supply by inflating it.
Then there is other type of 'demand', which is really just a wish. Do I wish I had Enterprise like space ship at my disposal? Sure. Do I wish somebody gave me one for free? Sure.
Do I want to spend my own time and money building one? No. The reason is that I don't actually have a purpose for it, rather than to amuse myself. I also do not expect to live 10000000 years that it would take me to build one (probably). By spending my time and money that way I would deny myself any other wants and desires I may have for things other than the Enterprise space ship. I would put myself through huge amounts of hardship, I would have to deny myself all sorts of nicer things in life. So if I am unwilling to do this to myself, what right do I have to ask others to do this for me?
No, I do not subscribe to Keynesian ideas at all - the ideas that government must generate demand by printing money - I see these as destructive to the economy, these are the ideas that destroyed this economy anyway. Government can only print and tax, it cannot generate actual real demand, as in, it cannot make people want to spend their own work for something if the people don't get a real benefit from it.
You are saying that government should do this, because you think it is a nice idea. But if there is no market for it it means people are not in mass going to spend their own work to achieve your 'nice' idea. You want government to force the people to spend any amount of their work (that's what money is after all) on this, isn't it selfish of you? Just because you think something maybe a great idea does not make it so.
You want something? Sell it to others but not through force of government, but as a viable business opportunity and a good product that's worth the investment.
Government does not need to be there for any work. Government is not there for work in the first place - it's a spending item for minimum military protection and justice system. I would be a huge success if government could just do those two things and not screw up the economy and society in the process.
You know, all those SS checks people expect to keep receiving? They'll be receiving them but the money is buying less and less, that's because government is constantly spending and borrowing and printing.
Realize that in 50s/60s the minimum legal wage was around 1.50USD/hour, which was 1.5 ounces of silver. Today that would be 60USD/hour (minimum wage) and people didn't pay taxes on that wage, so that's even more. The government has printed so much money, that silver is over 40bucks/ounce today. That's why the prices are so high and are going much higher for everything and you want government to keep printing and spending?
Your argument is this: people like things for free, so let's get government to do those things.
When I say 'demand', I do mean money. Demand is cash. If government supplies the cash, then it supplies the demand, surely. It does not matter if it subsidizes this for 5 people or for 500 people who would want this but can't pay for it themselves. It's not market that created that demand, there was not enough demand from enough people to allocate enough resources for the project, this means this is mis-allocation of resources for the majority of the market - pure and simple.
As to interstate highways - here is a clue by 4. Those are destructive to the market. They were built by taxing airlines and by destroying profitable private rail, which was much more efficient at moving huge loads across huge distances. The interstate highways subsidized the auto-manufacturers as well as the unsustainable life style (and it is unsustainable without subsidies, and subsidies will end.)
The highway system caused huge suburban sprawl, huge inefficiencies in transportation, created huge amounts of pollution, crazy amount of deaths due to increased reliance on cars (for health reasons as well as due to traffic accidents), caused demise of any usable private offering in viable (and I mean profitable when I say viable, because anything that is viable must be profitable) mass transit solutions.
All this while also providing government with more new ways to control your behavior and life, because the interstate highways are the pressure points that the federal gov't applies to localities when it wants something from them.
Anyway, enjoy your subsidized life style while it lasts.
- I did not even know about it until the upgrade on one machine. The other I got as a gift actually, with this thing pre-installed. I use the machines for development work, it's not a phone or a tablet. I didn't as much 'test it out', as I was put in front of this fact: here is Unity. Apparently starting from some later version of Ubuntu there will be no easy 'log out/log into Classic' choice, so I don't like the way things are going (starting from the minimize/maximize/close buttons shifting to the left), I will definitely move to another distro, likely Debian and likely with the BSD core.
Maybe that would address your issue?
- no, my issue is the fact that one button now starts an application or is used to maximize one that is running already (in this case), is that how it works? My issue is only addressed by not using such an interface, clearly the entire paradigm is going somewhere that is at odds with my preferences.
Shame? What a troll. I need a stable system. If I find out that what is coming my way in a year is going to be this Unity crap without simple way to switch to Classic, I must know now, so I can plan the switch to Debian or something like that accordingly, dumb ass.
first: as I said, I got rid of unity already. I am not going back to it, so there will be no middle clicking.
second: I never used windows 7 or Vista. I had to help somebody with it once, it was an unbearable experience. Same with Apple interfaces for Macs - I do not use them because I find them to be unbearable (for me, it's my own opinion, you may love that stuff, I am absolutely turned off by anything like that and I can't use it, it's not designed for me, I am not the target audience.)
When I minimize a window I expect to see an icon for that DOCUMENT. I expect to see as many minimized window icons as I have documents opened in that application. Some applications group the documents with tabs - FF for example (and it seems all other browsers now too), OK, that's their paradigm. However I if opened a text pad, I expect to see as many icons for it as I have instances of it running.
However, once again, an icon that both starts a new application and reopens one that is running already is not for me. I am not interested.
A government agency wants a 'commercial' product that does not really exist? So what makes that product 'commercial'?
If there is a commercial product and a government agency decides to buy from the manufacturer - well, that's one thing. Good for the manufacturer if he lands the tender. However if the product does not exist because the market hasn't found the reason/money/customers for it yet and the government then comes and says: here is a bunch of money, go build us a 'commercial' solution - well then, there will be a solution. But it will have NOTHING to do with market. The government money comes in, creates the demand, but except that government demand there is no private demand, so the solution will be totally inefficient, unusable under normal market conditions (without government subsidies).
What I am saying is this: government wants to prop up yet another bunch of companies and call it 'commercial', well, don't be fooled. Sure, they'll subsidize something there with fake money, like they always do, but it won't help the economy in any way, as the demand is artificial, as the money is not coming out of savings but instead creates more inflation, because it's printed and as the economy goes into worse trouble, because debts are increased and not repaid.
Don't call it 'commercial' if government pays for all the demand, it ain't no such thing.
Precisely why I put the first paragraph into my comment that reads this:
I am not an Apple user, I don't own any iProducts and don't want to in no small part because I absolutely despise their way of doing interfaces. I hate the 'ribbon' garbage as well, BTW.
I never used Vista, really, never touched it. I used a Mac maybe twice in my life - hated it. Learn to read.
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Maybe you should learn a bit about US political system. The Congress was the body that passed the Coinage Act, not a president, that's first.
Secondly: people do right things and wrong things very close together, why is that a surprise?
A government-run postal service was set up by the same people who passed your beloved coinage law.
When did I say it was not? Do you only have reading comprehension problems or is it a more general attention deficit disorder?
Yeah, government can guarantee any and every single thing it wants - it doesn't have to make money. All this is good until it crashes the economy with its weight and then the guarantees will mean nothing. Who cares that you'll get your check and your paper money if they buy nothing?
Let's see how the government 'guarantee' is working out for the housing market and price stability and SS and minimum wage and Medicare/Medicaid and safety and the value of the dollar itself.
What did Ben say when asked by Ron Paul about the definition of the dollar? Oooh, yeah, he said:
My definition of the dollar is what it can buy. Consumers donâ(TM)t want to buy gold; they want to buy food, and gasoline, and clothes and all the other things that are in the consumer basket. It is the buying power of the dollar in terms of those goods and services that is what is important, and thatâ(TM)s what I call price stability.
Right. So the dollar "is what it buys".
However there is an action definition of the dollar, as it was stated by the Coinage Act of 1792, and it's not some hand waiving.
The dollar is supposed to be a unit of weight of gold or silver defined like this:
371 4/16 grain (24.1 g) pure or 416 grain (27.0 g) standard silver.
$10 is 247 4/8 grain (16.0 g) pure or 270 grain (17.5 g) standard gold.
--
So excuse me if I do not believe in any government guarantees.
If you take your dollar to the Federal reserve bank you are NOT going to get 27g of pure silver, and for your 10 dollars you will not get 17.5g standard gold.
Government that prints money and guarantees stuff ends up destroying its economy and society.
Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Star!
About half as much as was created via all that government intervention.
- this is called inflation, son. When government does something and GDP grows, that's because they have printed so much money, that prices doubled.
You can call it growth, I call it destruction of the economy.
GDP growing in nominal terms means just the number is going up. The actual value of money falling, that's the real fact. Since 1913 the Fed printed so much money, that the value of dollar fell by 99% since then.
Even just since 2003, the dollar lost 3/4 of value, so when the Fed prints money and prices rise and GDP 'increases' because of that, while people are using credit to buy things that are rising in price due to the inflation of the money supply, this does nothing good for the economy.
Real good would be to let the economy operate on its own (like it mostly did in USA in 19 century) and let the prices fall.
Yes, falling prices are much better for quality of life, when they are brought upon by competition and increased business activity. That's what USA had and that's what was destroyed by the government starting from 1913 (Fed/IRS) and then further, once the minimum wage and SS and FDIC and Medicare/Medicaid and the military industrial complex were introduced. The subsidies to businesses, subsidies to voters, all the business regulations, price controls, exchange controls, getting off of the gold standard and printing printing printing.
You can call it GDP growth that everything is going up in price. I call it inflation and it's bad for economy and it's destroying US economy and economies of other Western nations.
The Asian economies are producing, so at least while they are following the footsteps of the US (sure, it still has the reserve currency), they are actually increasing their manufacturing and agriculture and mining sectors, while the unproductive economies of the West only grow government and financial and service sectors. Those are not productive, those do not actually increase GDP, but hey, all that money that went into bailing out the banks - that increased GDP.
Yeah, bailing out the banks increased GDP. What good did it do to the economy? It just brought the ultimate collapse closer, as the economy was not let restructure and the debts became bigger and the resources and credit are still mis-allocated.
Yeah, the GDP grew with all that nonsense of government printing and spending. Too bad GDP means nothing good for the economy when it's grown by the government.
Hey, dumbass, Linux IS the software that Linus Torvalds started - the fucking KERNEL, you dumb ass.
All you need is the cloud.
What you do is get a cloud. Just connect all your machines and networks and cables to the cloud and you will be aaaaalright.
that's actually nonsense. How much wealth is destroyed via all that government intervention? When the highways were built, all that rail track that was removed, how much GDP did that cost? All that oil that then needed to be bought and refined and just burned to run the inefficient vehicles, how much real GDP did that cost?
GDP is meaningless if all you do is burn rubber.
I wonder what good it would do them if they stick their toaster oven into my Nokia 6303c?
Neither, I'm providing a factual description for those reading along that might not be familiar with Unity
- you are arguing for unity in my thread for those, who are unfamiliar with it and you are replying to my comments to do so?
Here is what I think about unity: vomit.
- I found out they are going to remove the classic desktop and I won't have the choice, I so I am moving to
something else, yes.
Because you choose to download and install an operating system which prominently presents it as the default UI.
- now here you are misleading any potential reader.
I used Ubuntu for years, so with the new update to one machine I did NOT expect this change at all.
The other machine was given to me as a gift with Ubuntu pre-installed, I switched it to Debian already.
No, what Canonical is doing is underhanded and stealthy when applied to the existing user base. I am not interested in their new big idea of how to use a graphical desktop, I was never interested in it. If Ubuntu had Unity when I first was choosing the distro, I would have gone with Slackware back then.
The launcher bar more like a menu than a "memory paging algorithm" (I don't even get what you are trying to get at with your description.)
- you don't understand? Paging - keeping the last used memory in closest buffer (RAM for example) because if it was used recently, there is a higher chance it will be used again sooner than other memory, that wasn't used recently.
Anyway, good luck with your educational comments there.
What the hell? It was Stephen Cook when I took his classes back in the nineties.
Hey, /. editors, how is that guy, what's his name, Commander TacoBell doing?
Um, the battery power and network status icons are on the top bar, not gotten rid of.
- it was gone on my machines.
The only different thing is that, if its an application you have a permanent launcher icon for, that's the same icon you'd use to launch if it weren't already open.
- the ONLY difference? :) It kills it for me dead.
That "crazy search menu" is a menu tree that also has a keyboard input area. So, no, the idea of a menu tree is not gone, just evolved.
- yeah, evolved away from my computer.
Run any app that doesn't have a permanent launch bar icon and you'll see a new launch icon in the bar, and when you minimize that app, that new icon will stay there.
- wow. Are you trying to sell it to me or are you trying to make me puke, because I am getting nauseous.
The new icon will also have an arrow on the left, just like every icon for a running app, whether minimized or not. That arrow indicates that its a running app.
- so it destroys my normal tree menu, it's not even a menu, just a memory paging algorithm applied for no reason other than to show that the developer knew something about it?
IMO, its an elegant combination of functions that makes a few changes to traditional desktop GUI to present information better.
- and I am telling you it's not better, it is terrible.
Obviously, the original motivation was limited real estate netbook screens and limited precision touch and touchpad interfaces
- so why is it the default for my desktop?
but honestly I think its (despite some wrinkles that still need to be addressed) a better basic approach than the UIs it replaces.
- oh, it replaces alright, it replaces itself from my computer.
Get rid of government involvement, stop giving preferential treatment to some companies over others with special tax laws, etc., level the playing field, get rid of the income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, all taxes that are based on income and only tax vices/some imports and have government feed of that, forbid the government from ever participating in economy, from making any economic decisions, from printing fiat currency, from borrowing money (in fact make sure that government officials cannot get any salaries at all if they can't balance the budget and live within the means allocated to them by the market through certain types of sales taxes) - this way there will be no motive to even attempt and bribe the government, if the government is only there to do basic military protection and provide the justice system, stop all government regulations, repeal all laws and close down all government departments, get rid of all social agenda ideas, get rid of wars... start paying out the debt partially, pay out something like 20 cents on the dollar, but make it known that that's what it will be, the rest will be a loss to the creditors.
That's what it would take to actually restructure the economy and start real competition that would actually allow prices to come down and the economy to pick up.
Are you saying it is a good thing that government stepped in with government money then? I do not consider it to be a good thing, you see? It was not a good thing - there must be legitimate demand for an industry to appear, because industry must become profitable and thus viable without taxation. It must be profitable all on its own.
You do realize that the air travel was very expensive for a very long time even in USA and it became affordable only with massive amounts of competition that came about due to massive lobbying of the government?
There is a very legitimate reason to have uncertainty and risk - government cannot remove risk. Any such idea that government actually removes risk is just another step to a disaster of the magnitude of the housing and banking crisis (and now the currency crisis and the upcoming hyper inflationary depression that will be combined with ridiculously low employment opportunities) because government does not actually assess risk and it does not INVEST money, it does not hedge. It does not invest money to have a fund.
For example SS or Medicare/Medicaid, those are welfare programs, because there was never a fund (even though it was sold to the US public as if there was a fund) but the fund consisted of a check written by government to itself (that's what yields and bonds and notes are), and the money was spent immediately.
It is as if I wrote myself a check for a million dollars and put it into a bank and said I was a millionaire. It did not change my financial situation, but it did use an accounting trick to pretend there was something there, which wasn't actually there.
Any government involvement is destructive to the market, because government involvement equates to inflation and inflation destroys savings, which means it pushes savings and investment out, to other economies, and this in turn destroys the productivity and jobs, which means that the circle closes, since the fewer jobs there are, the more money is printed (and borrowed) by the government, which promises people bread and circuses to continue.
I am starting to wonder exactly which versions of Ubuntu you have had and now have. The movement of the buttons from the right to the left has been in Ubuntu since 10.10 (might even have been 10.04).
- I know. I am just pointing out that the interface is changing to something I do not want to use. That little change with the minimize/maximize/close buttons was really irrelevant, I switched it back immediately, but I remembered it. I remembered that the interface started changing that way, started moving things around that should not have been moved (by default at least) and to me this was notable enough, I was expecting more of the like to continue, but I honestly did not expect what I saw with Unity to happen that quickly.
I did not expect Unity at all.
Maybe what really bugs me is that Unity became the default, rather than being some option, advertised by the company as a feature that could be turned on - this I can definitely support. Sure, have at it, go nuts. As long as I am not forced into this and it is not made the default behavior, I wouldn't be bothered.
But as with the minimize/maximize/close buttons, this Unity thing did become the default. It was forced upon me. It was given to me as a matter of fact. It was NOT something I wanted, it was contrary to what I wanted.
If Ubuntu was using Unity back when I started using the distro, I would not have started, I would not have chosen it to be my desktop, do you see what I am saying? I would have been on something else all this time and never would have used Ubuntu.
The button doesn't act as a maximization button. If the application isn't running, it starts it. If it is running, but not in focus, it brings it to focus. If it is running and is in focus, it makes all of the application's windows available for selection.
- I don't think you are following me. I am not interested in shifting the paradigm of my desktop. I am even less interested in somebody shifting that paradigm for me by force.
Basically this is the beginning of the end of me using the distro the way things are going.
This borrows a lot from OSX.
- obviously. And I don't use OSX because I don't like it, and I don't like Unity (now I know I don't like it, good thing I found out now and didn't wait for an LTS version that pushed this onto me all of a sudden.)
but the airlines and air travel ain't one of them
- what are you trying to say? The airlines were taxed severely by FDR while he was also busy taking down rail road tracks to lay his highway system.
He basically destroyed the profitability of both systems of transportation (as well as the public transportation within city limits) to create this unsustainable system of roads, which also gave the government leverage against local governments.
When you say that government 'saved' the air travel, you are forgetting who was the real cause of the rise of terrorism in the world - all of the foreign policy stuff, that USA was/is conducting is to attempt and control the oil reserves, which would not even be necessary if there was no huge subsidy to the auto-industry with all that interstate highway system.
Also do not forget, that the government (FAA), destroys efficiencies in the system - for example regulating air routes, not letting foreign carriers to operate within US borders for local travel, so a plane that lands comes from abroad and lands in New York and then lands in LA cannot take on domestic passengers from New York and bring them to LA, etc.
You figure silver is the index of all things?
- silver, gold, cotton, wheat, pork bellies, concentrated orange juice, copper, land for agriculture, oil, gas, uranium, etc. - those things are real.
Dollars are not real.
Yes, I consider silver to be real money, I consider gold to be real money, etc. I also do not consider dollars to be real money (or ANY fiat currency for that matter, though relative to each other some do better and some do worse, but they are all fiat and all are printed at the whim of a politician, none of them are money.)
Silver, gold, etc. - they are stores of value, they can be easily used as units of account and means of trade. They are valuable because of their various properties. Gold is money because it is rare enough, it can't be printed, it does not change over time, it can be reclaimed from any industrial use, it can be easily tested to be real or not, it is accepted as money and has been accepted as money (means of trade) for thousands of years nearly universally.
Gold does not need to be made 'legal tender', it is money on its own, without any government stating it to be so. Of-course people can use all sorts of things for barter, it doesn't have to be gold. But as long as government cannot print the stuff that you use as money, it's already better than fiat paper.
It was worth more in 1980 then it is now--are we on the right track?
- relative to what?
Do you realize that today oil is the CHEAPEST it has EVER been?
If you have a silver dime minted prior to 1965 that is, then oil is the cheapest. In US dollars the silver coin is not the most expensive as you are pointing out, but in oil it is the most expensive and oil is the cheapest. You can buy a gallon of gas for a silver dime minted prior to 1965. With US dollars you have to spend how much? 4 dollars, soon to be 5?
On the other hand, the medications that are currently keeping me alive didn't exist, at any weight of silver, gold, or unobtanium, in the fifties and sixties.I had a smallpox shot back in those halcyon days of economic splendor, a shot that my children didn't need.
- good for you. The reason for the increased innovation is capitalism and industrialization and not fiat money though. It is reliance on under-utilization, savings and real money that made it possible in the 19th century to build the economy, that allowed such concentration of wealth that pushed innovation forward. It was not fiat money that caused your medication to appear, it's the real capitalism - based on savings and re-investment. And real capitalism that is based on savings exists despite the fiat money, not because of it.
Capitalism is based on savings and investment and fiat punishes anybody who is trying to save (in fiat currency). The only way to save is to have real assets that appreciate in currency that is being debased by the government. The only real investment comes out of the savings (capital) and the only way to save is not to be in fiat, which is printed every day by politicians, who want to buy your vote for giving you 'free stuff'.
Do you really believe that people command 1/26 of the spending power their parents did, just because the price of silver has changed by that much?
- yes.
Yes.
How else do you think it was possible for a man to support a family - a house wife and a bunch of kids, to own a house and maybe a boat and maybe another property and a couple of cars and be debt free before 1971? It was because the purchasing power was that much bigger. Was it precisely 26 times greater than? Nothing is exactly precisely 100%, but today people own mortgages, not houses, they don't have a bunch of kids and the wife is working too (and maybe there is a second job, who knows) and they still can't afford all that stuff they want and they don't see their kids enough to be able to raise them properly.
Do you
Profitable private rail? The private rail that was built on massive amounts of federal land, and supported through government strike-breaking? That private rail?
- yes, that private profitable rail, and I absolutely agree with you, the government acted criminally by supporting anybody, including the rail tycoons. But by the time we are talking about the rail was private and profitable and it was efficient, roads were not.
Do you honestly think that there is no demand for air travel?
- first, the successful airplanes were created privately. Those, who had government funding (I am thinking about the Aerodrome fiasco) failed. Those who got the planes to fly successfully, did it on their own.
Any government money was not needed to have commercial air travel. Commercial air travel was going to happen. The same may be true of space, but it's not the time yet.
And yes, your argument is that people like things for free. Do you know why? Because there is demand, which is willingness to put the money where the mouth is, which really means WORK, because money is expression of work. Money that is printed by government is not about work, it's about taxing the existing money supply by inflating it.
Then there is other type of 'demand', which is really just a wish. Do I wish I had Enterprise like space ship at my disposal? Sure. Do I wish somebody gave me one for free? Sure.
Do I want to spend my own time and money building one? No. The reason is that I don't actually have a purpose for it, rather than to amuse myself. I also do not expect to live 10000000 years that it would take me to build one (probably). By spending my time and money that way I would deny myself any other wants and desires I may have for things other than the Enterprise space ship. I would put myself through huge amounts of hardship, I would have to deny myself all sorts of nicer things in life. So if I am unwilling to do this to myself, what right do I have to ask others to do this for me?
No, I do not subscribe to Keynesian ideas at all - the ideas that government must generate demand by printing money - I see these as destructive to the economy, these are the ideas that destroyed this economy anyway. Government can only print and tax, it cannot generate actual real demand, as in, it cannot make people want to spend their own work for something if the people don't get a real benefit from it.
You are saying that government should do this, because you think it is a nice idea. But if there is no market for it it means people are not in mass going to spend their own work to achieve your 'nice' idea. You want government to force the people to spend any amount of their work (that's what money is after all) on this, isn't it selfish of you? Just because you think something maybe a great idea does not make it so.
You want something? Sell it to others but not through force of government, but as a viable business opportunity and a good product that's worth the investment.
Government does not need to be there for any work. Government is not there for work in the first place - it's a spending item for minimum military protection and justice system. I would be a huge success if government could just do those two things and not screw up the economy and society in the process.
You know, all those SS checks people expect to keep receiving? They'll be receiving them but the money is buying less and less, that's because government is constantly spending and borrowing and printing.
Realize that in 50s/60s the minimum legal wage was around 1.50USD/hour, which was 1.5 ounces of silver. Today that would be 60USD/hour (minimum wage) and people didn't pay taxes on that wage, so that's even more. The government has printed so much money, that silver is over 40bucks/ounce today. That's why the prices are so high and are going much higher for everything and you want government to keep printing and spending?
Well, prepare to be able to buy abs
Your argument is this: people like things for free, so let's get government to do those things.
When I say 'demand', I do mean money. Demand is cash. If government supplies the cash, then it supplies the demand, surely. It does not matter if it subsidizes this for 5 people or for 500 people who would want this but can't pay for it themselves. It's not market that created that demand, there was not enough demand from enough people to allocate enough resources for the project, this means this is mis-allocation of resources for the majority of the market - pure and simple.
As to interstate highways - here is a clue by 4. Those are destructive to the market. They were built by taxing airlines and by destroying profitable private rail, which was much more efficient at moving huge loads across huge distances. The interstate highways subsidized the auto-manufacturers as well as the unsustainable life style (and it is unsustainable without subsidies, and subsidies will end.)
The highway system caused huge suburban sprawl, huge inefficiencies in transportation, created huge amounts of pollution, crazy amount of deaths due to increased reliance on cars (for health reasons as well as due to traffic accidents), caused demise of any usable private offering in viable (and I mean profitable when I say viable, because anything that is viable must be profitable) mass transit solutions.
All this while also providing government with more new ways to control your behavior and life, because the interstate highways are the pressure points that the federal gov't applies to localities when it wants something from them.
Anyway, enjoy your subsidized life style while it lasts.
But, then why did you test it out?
- I did not even know about it until the upgrade on one machine. The other I got as a gift actually, with this thing pre-installed. I use the machines for development work, it's not a phone or a tablet. I didn't as much 'test it out', as I was put in front of this fact: here is Unity. Apparently starting from some later version of Ubuntu there will be no easy 'log out/log into Classic' choice, so I don't like the way things are going (starting from the minimize/maximize/close buttons shifting to the left), I will definitely move to another distro, likely Debian and likely with the BSD core.
Maybe that would address your issue?
- no, my issue is the fact that one button now starts an application or is used to maximize one that is running already (in this case), is that how it works? My issue is only addressed by not using such an interface, clearly the entire paradigm is going somewhere that is at odds with my preferences.
Shame? What a troll. I need a stable system. If I find out that what is coming my way in a year is going to be this Unity crap without simple way to switch to Classic, I must know now, so I can plan the switch to Debian or something like that accordingly, dumb ass.
first: as I said, I got rid of unity already. I am not going back to it, so there will be no middle clicking.
second: I never used windows 7 or Vista. I had to help somebody with it once, it was an unbearable experience. Same with Apple interfaces for Macs - I do not use them because I find them to be unbearable (for me, it's my own opinion, you may love that stuff, I am absolutely turned off by anything like that and I can't use it, it's not designed for me, I am not the target audience.)
When I minimize a window I expect to see an icon for that DOCUMENT. I expect to see as many minimized window icons as I have documents opened in that application. Some applications group the documents with tabs - FF for example (and it seems all other browsers now too), OK, that's their paradigm. However I if opened a text pad, I expect to see as many icons for it as I have instances of it running.
However, once again, an icon that both starts a new application and reopens one that is running already is not for me. I am not interested.
A government agency wants a 'commercial' product that does not really exist? So what makes that product 'commercial'?
If there is a commercial product and a government agency decides to buy from the manufacturer - well, that's one thing. Good for the manufacturer if he lands the tender. However if the product does not exist because the market hasn't found the reason/money/customers for it yet and the government then comes and says: here is a bunch of money, go build us a 'commercial' solution - well then, there will be a solution. But it will have NOTHING to do with market. The government money comes in, creates the demand, but except that government demand there is no private demand, so the solution will be totally inefficient, unusable under normal market conditions (without government subsidies).
What I am saying is this: government wants to prop up yet another bunch of companies and call it 'commercial', well, don't be fooled. Sure, they'll subsidize something there with fake money, like they always do, but it won't help the economy in any way, as the demand is artificial, as the money is not coming out of savings but instead creates more inflation, because it's printed and as the economy goes into worse trouble, because debts are increased and not repaid.
Don't call it 'commercial' if government pays for all the demand, it ain't no such thing.
Precisely why I put the first paragraph into my comment that reads this:
I am not an Apple user, I don't own any iProducts and don't want to in no small part because I absolutely despise their way of doing interfaces. I hate the 'ribbon' garbage as well, BTW.
I never used Vista, really, never touched it. I used a Mac maybe twice in my life - hated it. Learn to read.