I must disagree. In my experience, people who are considering or who already own SUVs due to their perceived safety generally think that, in the event of a two-vehicle accident, the other guy is essentially on his own. If he gets the worst of it due to having a smaller car, it's his own fault for not having also bought an SUV. I've never heard anyone say "I've never thought of that!" after being asked about the other guy in a hypothetical accident.
What's wrong is that it's simply too expensive. I'd like to get an iPhone 3G but there's no way I'm going to pay $70/month for a telephone. $60 was right on my threshold for buying, and $70 is just too much. It may be necessary, reasonable, or whatever, but from my perspective as the customer it's just too much money.
The cell phone situation in the US sucks pretty hard right now for a medium-light user. There's essentially no way to spend less than $45/month (including taxes) on a cell phone, even though I use perhaps 1/5th of my plan. Prepaid might save me a little money, but they don't get to be really sensible until you're calling much less than I am each month.
Yes, there are times when you can avoid, and times when you cannot. This does not make it useless to favor avoidance over resilience.
You need to carry out a more complete analysis. Being able to avoid accidents in some situations will result in fewer accidents, and will result in some of those accidents being less bad. Being less crash-worthy (but please note that many SUVs, despite their size, are extremely unworthy in a crash!) will result in some of the remaining accidents being worse. To decide what's better, you need to see if the latter overcomes the former.
Most people feel helpless on the road and therefore feel safest with massive amounts of passive protection at all times, but I don't think this is actually the best way to go. Not the least because carrying all that extra passive protection around with you costs a huge amount of money, especially at $4/gallon.
Plenty of people do something wrong and either spend the rest of their lives in jail (pretty permanent) or are executed (really permanent). So yes, permanently.
You might as well rail against how we talk about the right to be free while imprisoning criminals. Being convicted of a crime removes you from many otherwise "inalienable" rights.
My dictionary defines coercion as "the act of coercing; use of force or intimidation to obtain compliance." So unless your political ads are way different from mine, no, they are not about coercion.
Oh right, forget about corruption, the old-boys network, golden parachutes, lack of accountability, golden parachutes, short-term thinking, insider trading, and all the rest. The real problem is some linguistic foible that hasn't mattered for over a century!
It's not some vast conspiracy, people just don't know or don't care what the difference is. At this point, with no true democracies in the world, the word has been adopted to refer to representative democracies. There's nothing sinister about it.
You really want a bunch of components in a bag, sold at a sufficient markup to let the "assembler" make a living at it? How weird. Why? You talk about modding it into something for your taste. Are you really able to make metal and plastic molding to similar quality that you'd find in a brand-name laptop? And are you really willing to put in the time and effort required to construct it?
As for the price tag being heavy, that obviously depends on your opinion. If you think it's heavy, don't buy them. A lot of people think the price is fine, and they buy them. It's called opinion and individual taste. Nobody forces you to buy a Mac.
The Darwin userland is a mix of GNU and BSD. The Mac OS X userland includes Darwin but also a huge mess of proprietary libraries, most or all of which assume that mach is available. Apple Events, Cocoa Distributed Objects, their window server, and many other technologies are all built on mach messages.
Just so. The problem is that these people not only disagree, but they can't possibly fathom that the other person might be right in some way. Their own rightness is seen as a fact of nature, a universal law. This attitude, of course, rapidly turns any discussion into a giant flamefest because there's simply no room given to the other side, who in this worldview is necessarily stupid, misinformed, or evil.
What happens if the wind that should be generating electricity for the compressors takes the day off and chooses to make an unfashionably late arrival?
You draw power from the grid, which you'll still be connected to.
Good luck replacing the kernel with FreeBSD. The OS X userland depends heavily on mach, so xnu will not go quietly.
As for "quality hardware is electrically better. period." This is simply not true, as I will demonstrate by taking the argument to its logical conclusion.
If all you care about is the quality of the components, then let us construct the ultimate laptop. Go out and design the best motherboard, get the best CPU and GPU, the best hard drive, the best screen. Connect it all together.
Since we don't care about anything besides the electronics, let's just put it all into a paper bag. We can wrap the components in some electrical insulation first to make sure they don't short each other out.
So here's your bag-laptop. Do you want it? I rather doubt it! Thus proving that exterior design does, in fact, matter.
Apple has great industrial design, and this is one big reason why people buy them over regular PCs.
Oh no, you don't understand. The factory should stop being so damned efficient, and start charging a lot more money for new TVs. Then people will stop being so wasteful and start repairing their TVs instead of replacing them.
I was sure that would be the case so my post was mostly a joke, but it was worth a shot!
Given all the public money that goes into health care even in the US and its supposedly private system, it seems like it would be a net win for the government to set up a similar system here. Given what an emergency room visit costs here, you wouldn't need to prevent very many to make it pay off.
Do people really give up that easily? I mean, it certainly pisses me off and makes me look into competitors when it's really bad, but it never stops me from spending lots of time on the phone with them until they resolve my problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I must disagree. In my experience, people who are considering or who already own SUVs due to their perceived safety generally think that, in the event of a two-vehicle accident, the other guy is essentially on his own. If he gets the worst of it due to having a smaller car, it's his own fault for not having also bought an SUV. I've never heard anyone say "I've never thought of that!" after being asked about the other guy in a hypothetical accident.
What's wrong is that it's simply too expensive. I'd like to get an iPhone 3G but there's no way I'm going to pay $70/month for a telephone. $60 was right on my threshold for buying, and $70 is just too much. It may be necessary, reasonable, or whatever, but from my perspective as the customer it's just too much money.
The cell phone situation in the US sucks pretty hard right now for a medium-light user. There's essentially no way to spend less than $45/month (including taxes) on a cell phone, even though I use perhaps 1/5th of my plan. Prepaid might save me a little money, but they don't get to be really sensible until you're calling much less than I am each month.
It's always possible to game the system if you're willing to defraud it sufficiently. I mean, hey, I need more money, what if my bank gets "robbed"?
These absolutist arguments are pointless.
Yes, there are times when you can avoid, and times when you cannot. This does not make it useless to favor avoidance over resilience.
You need to carry out a more complete analysis. Being able to avoid accidents in some situations will result in fewer accidents, and will result in some of those accidents being less bad. Being less crash-worthy (but please note that many SUVs, despite their size, are extremely unworthy in a crash!) will result in some of the remaining accidents being worse. To decide what's better, you need to see if the latter overcomes the former.
Most people feel helpless on the road and therefore feel safest with massive amounts of passive protection at all times, but I don't think this is actually the best way to go. Not the least because carrying all that extra passive protection around with you costs a huge amount of money, especially at $4/gallon.
This is Slashdot. If you can't do better in every possible way than every single thing that has ever been done before, then you're worthless.
Plenty of people do something wrong and either spend the rest of their lives in jail (pretty permanent) or are executed (really permanent). So yes, permanently.
You might as well rail against how we talk about the right to be free while imprisoning criminals. Being convicted of a crime removes you from many otherwise "inalienable" rights.
My dictionary defines coercion as "the act of coercing; use of force or intimidation to obtain compliance." So unless your political ads are way different from mine, no, they are not about coercion.
When you use the phrase "the problem", you imply that it is, in fact, mutually exclusive.
Oh right, forget about corruption, the old-boys network, golden parachutes, lack of accountability, golden parachutes, short-term thinking, insider trading, and all the rest. The real problem is some linguistic foible that hasn't mattered for over a century!
It's not some vast conspiracy, people just don't know or don't care what the difference is. At this point, with no true democracies in the world, the word has been adopted to refer to representative democracies. There's nothing sinister about it.
You really want a bunch of components in a bag, sold at a sufficient markup to let the "assembler" make a living at it? How weird. Why? You talk about modding it into something for your taste. Are you really able to make metal and plastic molding to similar quality that you'd find in a brand-name laptop? And are you really willing to put in the time and effort required to construct it?
As for the price tag being heavy, that obviously depends on your opinion. If you think it's heavy, don't buy them. A lot of people think the price is fine, and they buy them. It's called opinion and individual taste. Nobody forces you to buy a Mac.
The Darwin userland is a mix of GNU and BSD. The Mac OS X userland includes Darwin but also a huge mess of proprietary libraries, most or all of which assume that mach is available. Apple Events, Cocoa Distributed Objects, their window server, and many other technologies are all built on mach messages.
Just so. The problem is that these people not only disagree, but they can't possibly fathom that the other person might be right in some way. Their own rightness is seen as a fact of nature, a universal law. This attitude, of course, rapidly turns any discussion into a giant flamefest because there's simply no room given to the other side, who in this worldview is necessarily stupid, misinformed, or evil.
Who on Earth modded the "fixed it for you" asshole "Informative"? The answers to both our questions are no doubt similar.
Every time you use the phrase "fixed that for you," God makes you look like a tool.
What happens if the wind that should be generating electricity for the compressors takes the day off and chooses to make an unfashionably late arrival?
You draw power from the grid, which you'll still be connected to.
I guess when Isaac Asimov was infected with HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion he deserved to get sick and die!
Good luck replacing the kernel with FreeBSD. The OS X userland depends heavily on mach, so xnu will not go quietly.
As for "quality hardware is electrically better. period." This is simply not true, as I will demonstrate by taking the argument to its logical conclusion.
If all you care about is the quality of the components, then let us construct the ultimate laptop. Go out and design the best motherboard, get the best CPU and GPU, the best hard drive, the best screen. Connect it all together.
Since we don't care about anything besides the electronics, let's just put it all into a paper bag. We can wrap the components in some electrical insulation first to make sure they don't short each other out.
So here's your bag-laptop. Do you want it? I rather doubt it! Thus proving that exterior design does, in fact, matter.
Apple has great industrial design, and this is one big reason why people buy them over regular PCs.
Oh no, you don't understand. The factory should stop being so damned efficient, and start charging a lot more money for new TVs. Then people will stop being so wasteful and start repairing their TVs instead of replacing them.
Hah, excellent. I should probably work on my British accent though....
I doubt I'll be calling it, as I hate to be a freeloader, but it's great that these services are there.
I was sure that would be the case so my post was mostly a joke, but it was worth a shot!
Given all the public money that goes into health care even in the US and its supposedly private system, it seems like it would be a net win for the government to set up a similar system here. Given what an emergency room visit costs here, you wouldn't need to prevent very many to make it pay off.
Can you give me the number? I live in the US, not Ontario, but man, that sure would be handy!
Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just speculation?
Repairing a computer is much more likely to produce evidence against someone.
Because computers are inherently evil, or what? Why do you make this statement?
Do people really give up that easily? I mean, it certainly pisses me off and makes me look into competitors when it's really bad, but it never stops me from spending lots of time on the phone with them until they resolve my problem.