Until I realized that things would work smoother for myself if I just assumed I lived in a tyranny and I'd have to work hard to be able to escape it as soon as possible.
This is probably really good advice, as cynical as it is. The truth of the matter is, freedom is one dead dog.
That fact that you're so upset over this is a pretty big sign you're an Apple zealot.
I'm sure all the jokes about people obsessed with Apple are just by devious, bigoted men and women intent on massacring Applevangelists like the Nazis gassed jews. You poor oppressed thing.
I don't even really bash MacOSX... All the jokes about Mac products in it are mockeries of some of the silly things Apple fanboys on slashdot and elsewhere have said. As I've said elsewhere, you point out lack of features the Ipod has and instead of them admitting "yeah, it'd be nice if the Ipod had those features" instead they declare its lack of features to be a good thing because it might mean that if someone looked at features instead of how hip Ipods made you look someone might decide that the Ipod was an inferior product. Go figure.
No, the joke is precisely what it appears to be: making fun of pretentious Apple fanatics. In reality it doesn't matter what OS you use so long as it suits your purpose, but when you debate the relative pros and cons of apple products versus anything else, you're going to get marked down if you even imply the big A's products are overhyped and, at times, overpriced.
You don't see very many Windows zealots, and Linux evangelists are often still capable of pointing out Linux's own flaws. When it comes to Apple products, hey, the Ipod is a great device because of it's features--point out it lacks a lot of features that other, lower-priced mp3 players have, and suddenly that's a great boon because it's "simpler" to use.
The Apple fanboy is like the Nintendo Internet Warrior in this regard. You know the type, the type who responds angrily when you so much as criticize Nintendo's lack of good third party support (this has been a complaint for years, not much has changed) or the lack of quality titles on the Wii. They do exist, and so does the Apple fanboy.
Ipod users are generally like Windows users in the regard that they simply don't know about the alternatives. One difference, though, is that there aren't hordes of Windows users proclaiming that Window's popularity is due almost entirely to its features and qualities. Talking with people about mp3 players most that have, say, Ipod nanos typically got them because they just didn't know what else was on the market. Generally they weren't fans of iTunes and thought some of the features of other, common mp3 players were cool. Granted, if you like iTunes then Ipods may be a good idea, and Ipods do have some features other mp3 players don't have such as gapless playback. But the Applevangelists will proclaim the Ipods success is not due to marketing but because of it having either lots of features or not as many features, depending on which argument is convenient. Any feature the Ipod has is great, fantastic, amazing, so on and so forth, while any other feature other MP3 players have, such as FM tuners or expandibility through sdhc cards are just cruft and make it harder to use (a ridiculous accusation, but they must defend Apple at all costs) I think, though, if someone steps back and analyzes the pros and cons of mp3 players on the market a person honest with themselves will probably make a selection other than the Ipod. I suspect that actual act of owning an Ipod (and this potentially applies to many other products, from other companies, too) makes the owner value the product and its qualities more than they would if they didn't own it and let it grow on them. Buying something because of the brand name is stupid, whether it's t-shirts or music players.
Each OS will obviously have its pros and cons. Linux is rough around the edges and one wrong command in root can destroy all your data. Windows (yes, Vista is a good OS too, with many of its own great qualities) . And a lot of people apparently have their reasons for choosing Macs for video editing (I don't edit videos) and sometimes even Linux users set up their desktops to emulate desktop features of Mac OSX. But the dyed-in-the-black-turtleneck-wool Apple fans that describe themselves as being "part of the Mac community" and buying whatever Apple products come out simply because it's an Apple product are rather unique.
Actually, this isn't even a point about operating systems. I only mention operating system a little. It's the Apple worship this is about. When people start fawning over Microsoft products the same way (please shoot me if they do) then you'll see a story about a dystopian Microsoft future.
(I'm willing to let Linux and *BSD etc guys have more of a pass because Linux and the *BSD guys are not centered around for-profit companies; thus the projects truly have community backing them)
The only reason most Mac users ever act smug is because we're sick and tired of Windows people telling us that we're idiots who need to buy "real" computers.
Have you even watched the commercials Apple themselves put out? Worst part is that Macs are actually PCs themselves.
Call me back when people start putting Microsoft stickers on the back of their goddamn cars.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity. Curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most. I used two of the great unutterable blasphemies--something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
So... consumers are short sighted? Thanks for making my point!
Just had to reply to this one as well, as it was too cute. If you think that consumers are short sighted, just wait until you see the US government's national debt:)
That is, until it ain't cheap. Then f-ck you! Thanks for helping out, eh, raping the commons?
Might as well hire a "Commons Czar" that dictates everything we do result in maximum efficiency and utility for the whole, the commons. He can shuffle around food, power resources (yay!), and even jobs as he sees fit.
Guess you never heard of rolling blackouts, then? Explain that to my servers that were down for some 2 days as a result?/Sarcasm
How do you conclude that it must be from increasing scarcity? It very well may be bad infrastructure or the plant simply not properly keeping up with increasing power demands. Perhaps they don't have the equipment to properly provide an entire area with power. Think Sim City--the plant may simply be overtaxed. That says nothing about the amount of fuel available.
In this case, people are notoriously bad at figuring long term expenses that are sustained and slightly elevated. People will tend to pay $10,000 over the life of a car for a "cheaper" model that costs $4,000 less. They'll tend to buy the plasma TV that costs $300 less than the $2000 LED TV that lasts twice as long and uses 30% less electricity.
The reason for this isn't necessarily because of being bad at figuring out expenses, it's because of a lack of information. People generally don't know power consumption values, and let's face it... power is not that expensive.
And this affects the commons because power is increasingly a rare resource being squandered to provide a 5' wide screen typically viewed 15 feet back that provides the same viewing aspect ratio as a 19" TV at 4 feet at 11x the power. Power that isn't then available for running manufacturing plants, hospitals, and other things that generate real wealth, and require a tax-funded power plant to compensate for.
Ah, a tax-funded power plant? Does this mean the "real cost" of power is being hidden from consumers? One of the problems with so-called "progressive taxation" is that, when people in higher tax brackets pay a greater portion of the service, it distorts the cost of the service. What may, without shifting the tax burden to some other group (or even just disguising it by taking it through taxes) something may appear cheaper than it really is, resulting in people being less concerned over how much they use it.
For example, my university recently rolled out a "free" newspaper program where a card swipe opens up a dispenser that students can take newspapers out of, providing us with 3 choices--take the local one, US today, or New York times, or any combination of the three, it doesn't matter. Now, those newspapers are presumably not being given to the university for free, so students, unaware of the hidden cost, now grab them when they wouldn't have bought them at their news stand price in the first place.
You want people to be concerned about power usage? Make them pay the full cost directly, no shifting the fees to the evil nasty rich people, no disguising in through taxes, or anything of the sort. Or you can add a hefty tax to power, but that's obviously not exactly what I would do.
The people that buy the 300 dollar less TV are probably still going to save money in the long run than the 300 dollar more TV that saves 30% less energy. And, of course, people may need that 300 dollars NOW more than they need it LATER. And I don't even need to get into how fast it'll be obsolete.
And as for this:
But one thing that many of the "free market everywhere" people miss completely is the idea of the tragedy of the commons. I don't need to try to explain it [wikipedia.org] as it's already explained well elsewhere. But it's one concept that the "free market" Libertarian types completely ignore, at their own peril.
Tragedy of the commons is trotted out to libertarians so often they probably have heard more about it than you have. Actually, they get a chance to use the argument, too: when the government owns something, and thus, theoretically everyone and no one owns it, they tend to take less care of it. Take the famous example of a field shared by a bunch of herders--they will all deplete the vegetable life by all trying to maximize grazing. However, if that land was to be split up among the herders, they would each have an incentive to prevent overgrazing as they are only allotted a particular plot of land.
So are you saying that you are opposed to all antitrust laws? That even if it can be demonstrated that a company has harmed the market, to the detriment of competition and consumers, no action should be taken?
Haven't the consumers harmed the market as well, by choosing to enable a monopoly?
No, the real issue is that Microsoft undermined the competition with illegal methods. If IE was the dominant browser just because people didn't care, that would have been fine. But Microsoft has also used its embrace, extend and extinguish tactic to remove competition because they were afraif of the web as a competing platform for Windows. This was all in the US antitrust trial, so I'm surprised that you were unaware of this. It was a conscious tactic by Microsoft to destroy the competition to ensure that Windows remained dominant. They did it to Java too.
AGAIN, whether it was legal or not is beside the point. Every anti-competitive tactic MS used required consumers on the other end accepting it.
Microsoft's actions have indeed harmed people. It has made web technology slower, more expensive, and impacted security in a bad way. People have paid billions of dollars for Microsoft's anti-competitive practices.
I'd like to see you quantify those statements. Regardless, nobody has a right to "faster" technology; it's always going to be a relative statement so you're always going to fixate on what could have been instead of what was.
IE prevents competition, which makes things more expensive and of worse quality. The state of the web today is abysmal, since MS with its dominance has resisted change for the better. For example, they ruined ECMAScript 4 because it threatened Silverlight.
Firefox, Opera, etc are so easy to obtain--through IE, no less--that you're point is moot. Browsers are essentially being given away for free. Linux is given away for free! Sounds like pretty good competition to me. You just gotta convince people to switch.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and shining white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Wow, that sounds surprisingly like the Christian evangelists that tell those pesky atheists to "shut up", on how this is a "god-fearing country" so on and so forth.
This Obama worship is ridiculous. Politicians are some of the most dangerous men around. Let's not bind our own hands and feet and offer ourselves up to the sacrifice.
Yeah, and blacks were once told to drink at other water fountains, because "it's the law". I'm not comparing this to the civil rights struggle, only that "it's the law!" is never a good excuse for bad law or misapplication of the law.
People label including IE as "anticompetitive" but the real issue is that people are just too lazy to switch (believe me, I've tried to get people to make the switch--they refuse) and others don't want to or don't care to educate themselves. Some just prefer IE for whatever reason.
There's a difference between telling people what to do because you want someone to stick it to microsoft or someone else because you don't like them, and protecting someone from being harmed, which is what law is supposed to be (although never really was).
They're basically blaming the largest game in town for people's own non-education or laziness. That's really what it's all about.
The left tends to scare me because a lot of what they do (not like the right doesn't do this either) is try to engineer people or force their hands so they attitudes and actions center around making sure all their personal wants and dreams come true.
No, they CAN, but other people tell them what to do, because other people want the world to be a certain way and want to tell individuals, groups, and businesses how to act so the world is more shaped, more in-tune to their liking.
Although I suspect the EU is just trying to milk money out of MS like they did in the past. Extremely wealthy American company, doesn't hurt them so much...
I am frankly shocked and disgusted that Microsoft wants IE to be shipped with their operating system. They have a huge market advantage, as consumers overwhelmingly choose to buy Microsoft over Linux or anything else for whatever reason.
I demand that defrag, the default media player, debug and administration utilities, calculator, MS Paint, wordpad and notepad, the unzip utility, the cd burning utility, and any and all default drivers be stripped from Windows distributions to create a more even, more egalitarian, more democratic playing field.
Of course, my drive came in an anti-static bag... but the bag + hdd was wrapped in that really large bubble wrap wrapped around the HDDs. This time I got mine wrapped in that with a brown paper packing. Kind of lame.
Having a Seagate fail on me recently, too, I've been pretty annoyed off over the requirements. You want the thing covered in two inches of fucking rubber foam? Fucking ship your oem drives like that, then, instead of bubble wrap, if it's so necessary. Maybe you wouldn't get as many RMAs, if it's so critical that sending it the way they send it to you voids the warranty. I wonder if they also require a sacrifice to the Gods before shipping, too.
They actually sent you a note telling you you were a bad customer? What kind of fucking customer service is that? I'm not gonna go with Seagate again, especially after this news about their quality control.
The thing is, I, and many other people (hell, check reviews, people list no software lock-in as a plus on mp3 players) don't need or WANT to be locked in to software. We WANT to drag-and-drop. I don't WANT to sync rated songs. I know what iTunes does--I've used similar software--but I just DO NOT WANT IT. I've talked to quite a few people and they hate being forced to use iTunes. And syncing isn't even exclusive to iTunes anyway, but if you looked out from your Apple-tinted glasses you'd see that. Even if I lose out on some meta data, so what?
Who cares about FM? Some people do. It'd be pretty nice to listen to the classical music radio station for me now and again, and maybe NPR or other talk shows. Quite amusing you'd bash me for listing iTunes as a negative without using it, and then you brush off FM tuners simply because you don't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is people here want to cripple Windows to boost Linux adoption.
Copy and paste.
So true.
Until I realized that things would work smoother for myself if I just assumed I lived in a tyranny and I'd have to work hard to be able to escape it as soon as possible.
This is probably really good advice, as cynical as it is. The truth of the matter is, freedom is one dead dog.
That fact that you're so upset over this is a pretty big sign you're an Apple zealot.
I'm sure all the jokes about people obsessed with Apple are just by devious, bigoted men and women intent on massacring Applevangelists like the Nazis gassed jews. You poor oppressed thing.
It's worth it. I hope you enjoyed the story.
I don't even really bash MacOSX... All the jokes about Mac products in it are mockeries of some of the silly things Apple fanboys on slashdot and elsewhere have said. As I've said elsewhere, you point out lack of features the Ipod has and instead of them admitting "yeah, it'd be nice if the Ipod had those features" instead they declare its lack of features to be a good thing because it might mean that if someone looked at features instead of how hip Ipods made you look someone might decide that the Ipod was an inferior product. Go figure.
No, the joke is precisely what it appears to be: making fun of pretentious Apple fanatics. In reality it doesn't matter what OS you use so long as it suits your purpose, but when you debate the relative pros and cons of apple products versus anything else, you're going to get marked down if you even imply the big A's products are overhyped and, at times, overpriced.
You don't see very many Windows zealots, and Linux evangelists are often still capable of pointing out Linux's own flaws. When it comes to Apple products, hey, the Ipod is a great device because of it's features--point out it lacks a lot of features that other, lower-priced mp3 players have, and suddenly that's a great boon because it's "simpler" to use.
The Apple fanboy is like the Nintendo Internet Warrior in this regard. You know the type, the type who responds angrily when you so much as criticize Nintendo's lack of good third party support (this has been a complaint for years, not much has changed) or the lack of quality titles on the Wii. They do exist, and so does the Apple fanboy.
Ipod users are generally like Windows users in the regard that they simply don't know about the alternatives. One difference, though, is that there aren't hordes of Windows users proclaiming that Window's popularity is due almost entirely to its features and qualities. Talking with people about mp3 players most that have, say, Ipod nanos typically got them because they just didn't know what else was on the market. Generally they weren't fans of iTunes and thought some of the features of other, common mp3 players were cool. Granted, if you like iTunes then Ipods may be a good idea, and Ipods do have some features other mp3 players don't have such as gapless playback. But the Applevangelists will proclaim the Ipods success is not due to marketing but because of it having either lots of features or not as many features, depending on which argument is convenient. Any feature the Ipod has is great, fantastic, amazing, so on and so forth, while any other feature other MP3 players have, such as FM tuners or expandibility through sdhc cards are just cruft and make it harder to use (a ridiculous accusation, but they must defend Apple at all costs) I think, though, if someone steps back and analyzes the pros and cons of mp3 players on the market a person honest with themselves will probably make a selection other than the Ipod. I suspect that actual act of owning an Ipod (and this potentially applies to many other products, from other companies, too) makes the owner value the product and its qualities more than they would if they didn't own it and let it grow on them. Buying something because of the brand name is stupid, whether it's t-shirts or music players.
Each OS will obviously have its pros and cons. Linux is rough around the edges and one wrong command in root can destroy all your data. Windows (yes, Vista is a good OS too, with many of its own great qualities) . And a lot of people apparently have their reasons for choosing Macs for video editing (I don't edit videos) and sometimes even Linux users set up their desktops to emulate desktop features of Mac OSX. But the dyed-in-the-black-turtleneck-wool Apple fans that describe themselves as being "part of the Mac community" and buying whatever Apple products come out simply because it's an Apple product are rather unique.
Actually, this isn't even a point about operating systems. I only mention operating system a little. It's the Apple worship this is about. When people start fawning over Microsoft products the same way (please shoot me if they do) then you'll see a story about a dystopian Microsoft future.
(I'm willing to let Linux and *BSD etc guys have more of a pass because Linux and the *BSD guys are not centered around for-profit companies; thus the projects truly have community backing them)
The only reason most Mac users ever act smug is because we're sick and tired of Windows people telling us that we're idiots who need to buy "real" computers.
Have you even watched the commercials Apple themselves put out? Worst part is that Macs are actually PCs themselves.
Call me back when people start putting Microsoft stickers on the back of their goddamn cars.
I'm a PC. I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity. Curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most. I used two of the great unutterable blasphemies--something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
So... consumers are short sighted? Thanks for making my point!
Just had to reply to this one as well, as it was too cute. If you think that consumers are short sighted, just wait until you see the US government's national debt :)
That is, until it ain't cheap. Then f-ck you! Thanks for helping out, eh, raping the commons?
Might as well hire a "Commons Czar" that dictates everything we do result in maximum efficiency and utility for the whole, the commons. He can shuffle around food, power resources (yay!), and even jobs as he sees fit.
Guess you never heard of rolling blackouts, then? Explain that to my servers that were down for some 2 days as a result? /Sarcasm
How do you conclude that it must be from increasing scarcity? It very well may be bad infrastructure or the plant simply not properly keeping up with increasing power demands. Perhaps they don't have the equipment to properly provide an entire area with power. Think Sim City--the plant may simply be overtaxed. That says nothing about the amount of fuel available.
In this case, people are notoriously bad at figuring long term expenses that are sustained and slightly elevated. People will tend to pay $10,000 over the life of a car for a "cheaper" model that costs $4,000 less. They'll tend to buy the plasma TV that costs $300 less than the $2000 LED TV that lasts twice as long and uses 30% less electricity.
The reason for this isn't necessarily because of being bad at figuring out expenses, it's because of a lack of information. People generally don't know power consumption values, and let's face it... power is not that expensive.
And this affects the commons because power is increasingly a rare resource being squandered to provide a 5' wide screen typically viewed 15 feet back that provides the same viewing aspect ratio as a 19" TV at 4 feet at 11x the power. Power that isn't then available for running manufacturing plants, hospitals, and other things that generate real wealth, and require a tax-funded power plant to compensate for.
Ah, a tax-funded power plant? Does this mean the "real cost" of power is being hidden from consumers? One of the problems with so-called "progressive taxation" is that, when people in higher tax brackets pay a greater portion of the service, it distorts the cost of the service. What may, without shifting the tax burden to some other group (or even just disguising it by taking it through taxes) something may appear cheaper than it really is, resulting in people being less concerned over how much they use it.
For example, my university recently rolled out a "free" newspaper program where a card swipe opens up a dispenser that students can take newspapers out of, providing us with 3 choices--take the local one, US today, or New York times, or any combination of the three, it doesn't matter. Now, those newspapers are presumably not being given to the university for free, so students, unaware of the hidden cost, now grab them when they wouldn't have bought them at their news stand price in the first place.
You want people to be concerned about power usage? Make them pay the full cost directly, no shifting the fees to the evil nasty rich people, no disguising in through taxes, or anything of the sort. Or you can add a hefty tax to power, but that's obviously not exactly what I would do.
The people that buy the 300 dollar less TV are probably still going to save money in the long run than the 300 dollar more TV that saves 30% less energy. And, of course, people may need that 300 dollars NOW more than they need it LATER. And I don't even need to get into how fast it'll be obsolete.
And as for this:
But one thing that many of the "free market everywhere" people miss completely is the idea of the tragedy of the commons. I don't need to try to explain it [wikipedia.org] as it's already explained well elsewhere. But it's one concept that the "free market" Libertarian types completely ignore, at their own peril.
Tragedy of the commons is trotted out to libertarians so often they probably have heard more about it than you have. Actually, they get a chance to use the argument, too: when the government owns something, and thus, theoretically everyone and no one owns it, they tend to take less care of it. Take the famous example of a field shared by a bunch of herders--they will all deplete the vegetable life by all trying to maximize grazing. However, if that land was to be split up among the herders, they would each have an incentive to prevent overgrazing as they are only allotted a particular plot of land.
So are you saying that you are opposed to all antitrust laws? That even if it can be demonstrated that a company has harmed the market, to the detriment of competition and consumers, no action should be taken?
Haven't the consumers harmed the market as well, by choosing to enable a monopoly?
No, the real issue is that Microsoft undermined the competition with illegal methods. If IE was the dominant browser just because people didn't care, that would have been fine. But Microsoft has also used its embrace, extend and extinguish tactic to remove competition because they were afraif of the web as a competing platform for Windows. This was all in the US antitrust trial, so I'm surprised that you were unaware of this. It was a conscious tactic by Microsoft to destroy the competition to ensure that Windows remained dominant. They did it to Java too.
AGAIN, whether it was legal or not is beside the point. Every anti-competitive tactic MS used required consumers on the other end accepting it.
Microsoft's actions have indeed harmed people. It has made web technology slower, more expensive, and impacted security in a bad way. People have paid billions of dollars for Microsoft's anti-competitive practices.
I'd like to see you quantify those statements. Regardless, nobody has a right to "faster" technology; it's always going to be a relative statement so you're always going to fixate on what could have been instead of what was.
IE prevents competition, which makes things more expensive and of worse quality. The state of the web today is abysmal, since MS with its dominance has resisted change for the better. For example, they ruined ECMAScript 4 because it threatened Silverlight.
Firefox, Opera, etc are so easy to obtain--through IE, no less--that you're point is moot. Browsers are essentially being given away for free. Linux is given away for free! Sounds like pretty good competition to me. You just gotta convince people to switch.
I'm a PC.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and shining white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Wow, that sounds surprisingly like the Christian evangelists that tell those pesky atheists to "shut up", on how this is a "god-fearing country" so on and so forth.
This Obama worship is ridiculous. Politicians are some of the most dangerous men around. Let's not bind our own hands and feet and offer ourselves up to the sacrifice.
Yeah, and blacks were once told to drink at other water fountains, because "it's the law". I'm not comparing this to the civil rights struggle, only that "it's the law!" is never a good excuse for bad law or misapplication of the law.
People label including IE as "anticompetitive" but the real issue is that people are just too lazy to switch (believe me, I've tried to get people to make the switch--they refuse) and others don't want to or don't care to educate themselves. Some just prefer IE for whatever reason.
There's a difference between telling people what to do because you want someone to stick it to microsoft or someone else because you don't like them, and protecting someone from being harmed, which is what law is supposed to be (although never really was).
They're basically blaming the largest game in town for people's own non-education or laziness. That's really what it's all about.
The left tends to scare me because a lot of what they do (not like the right doesn't do this either) is try to engineer people or force their hands so they attitudes and actions center around making sure all their personal wants and dreams come true.
No, they CAN, but other people tell them what to do, because other people want the world to be a certain way and want to tell individuals, groups, and businesses how to act so the world is more shaped, more in-tune to their liking.
Although I suspect the EU is just trying to milk money out of MS like they did in the past. Extremely wealthy American company, doesn't hurt them so much...
If nobody cares, then what right do you have to make them care...?
Let's build the New Socialist Man while we're at it. The EU can be in charge.
I am frankly shocked and disgusted that Microsoft wants IE to be shipped with their operating system. They have a huge market advantage, as consumers overwhelmingly choose to buy Microsoft over Linux or anything else for whatever reason.
I demand that defrag, the default media player, debug and administration utilities, calculator, MS Paint, wordpad and notepad, the unzip utility, the cd burning utility, and any and all default drivers be stripped from Windows distributions to create a more even, more egalitarian, more democratic playing field.
Actually, it's Newegg I get my HDDs from.
Of course, my drive came in an anti-static bag... but the bag + hdd was wrapped in that really large bubble wrap wrapped around the HDDs. This time I got mine wrapped in that with a brown paper packing. Kind of lame.
Having a Seagate fail on me recently, too, I've been pretty annoyed off over the requirements. You want the thing covered in two inches of fucking rubber foam? Fucking ship your oem drives like that, then, instead of bubble wrap, if it's so necessary. Maybe you wouldn't get as many RMAs, if it's so critical that sending it the way they send it to you voids the warranty. I wonder if they also require a sacrifice to the Gods before shipping, too.
They actually sent you a note telling you you were a bad customer? What kind of fucking customer service is that? I'm not gonna go with Seagate again, especially after this news about their quality control.
Ah, but does it give you the ability to be a smug about your choice of computer software?
I think not.
The thing is, I, and many other people (hell, check reviews, people list no software lock-in as a plus on mp3 players) don't need or WANT to be locked in to software. We WANT to drag-and-drop. I don't WANT to sync rated songs. I know what iTunes does--I've used similar software--but I just DO NOT WANT IT. I've talked to quite a few people and they hate being forced to use iTunes. And syncing isn't even exclusive to iTunes anyway, but if you looked out from your Apple-tinted glasses you'd see that. Even if I lose out on some meta data, so what?
Who cares about FM? Some people do. It'd be pretty nice to listen to the classical music radio station for me now and again, and maybe NPR or other talk shows. Quite amusing you'd bash me for listing iTunes as a negative without using it, and then you brush off FM tuners simply because you don't use it.