No, modern cars are quite easy to service, as long as you buy Japanese. American cars are intentionally designed to be impossible to work on. If you can't work on your car, that's what you get for buying American.
That's idiotic.
I replaced the alternator's on my mother's Buick, as well as my sister's Honda at about the same time...
With the Buick, the alternator was on the top of the engine, just behind the block, and very easy to do.
With the Honda, you have to jack up the car, TAKE THE WHEEL OFF, remove the splash guard, slide under the car on your back, feel around for the bolt on the opposite/top-side of the alternator, loosen it in 1/16th turn increments because the clearance is so small, etc., etc. Then when you get it out, you get to do the same thing in reverse to install the new one.
And before anyone starts, both are mid-sized cars.
Have 2 classes, stock (unmodified) and top fuel (no limits or restrictions).
If you're going to allow unlimited drug use (immediately eliminating all genetic difference between men and women) why not just skip strait to the conclusion???
Cheetahs in track and field. Dolphins in water polo and freestyle swims. etc.
With unlimited drugs and genetic engineering, it's only a matter of time before athletes start growing extra pairs of legs, gills, fins, etc. With a few more advancements, it's going to be extremely difficult to determine if a participant qualifies as "human" anymore.
Bob Mathias was not permitted to complete in a third Olympics in the decathlon because he had made a movie and was paid for it.
The delineation between amateur and professional was always a VERY grey area, and extremely hard to prove.
Do gifts or discounts of sporting equipment apply?
Does "incidentally" wearing a logo mean you're a pro, and never-mind that the company didn't really pay you anything? Or vise versa, what if it's a scam to get the logo out there, which you only get paid for, 10 years later?
Does the announcement that you're from X city and supported by Y school, thereby increasing tourism for the city, and enrollment for the school, count?
- If so, that pretty much eliminates all avenues of non-professional sponsorship and you're paying out of pocket to try for a medal. - If not, then why should more direct "sponsorship" matter?
And most importantly, how do you account for the difference in economies of communist and socialist countries? They may never receive a penny, while still living in better comforts than a professional athlete in a capitalistic country.
But I digress. There is really no such question about doping. Either you are, or you aren't. Ditto for gender. I fail to see any equivalent between these two rules.
Someone making 30 million a year for what amounts to being lucky to have their genetics is ridiculous
You're still talking about athletes, right? Because this could just as easily apply to a top-paid expert in ANY field.
Your brain... It's affected by genetics, every bit as much as your muscles are. Of course, someone's going to chime-in to say that education can have a huge and equalizing effect on intelligence, versus being purely genetics... but the same is true for physical abilities as well... Substantial training can make anyone ridiculously strong, it's only at the very, very top of athletics that an average person can't reach without a major genetic advantage.
Now, there aren't exactly a lot of engineers making 30 million a year, but there are some. There aren't many athletes that make it up to that pay scale, either, we just see them a lot. Engineering isn't so much of a spectator's sport.
there was a considerable degree of government intervention in the economy--particularly after the 1820s."
"Considerable" is a very vague term. It may have been significant compared to previous years, but there was a very, very small amount of government interference by today's standards.
One of their examples is the creation of the First/Second Banks of the United States, which is a miniscule level of "intervention", and only directly relevant to the banking industry, such as it was.
The "intervention" in that time period was few and far between, and more to the point, only directly impacted a few industries. You could also point to the railroads for another example. But it's very difficult to claim that the economy wasn't Laissez Faire, just because of a few exceptions. In practice, nothing ever quite matches up perfectly with theory.
Umm, I think that's why they developed these things called "unions".
Indeed. But that's not the same as "an employee and an employer agree[ing]". Perhaps more to the point, though, Unions have practically no foothold in the tech industry right now.
Most big companies wouldn't exist in a free market,
That's completely and totally wrong. In a free market, big companies get bigger, because they have the capital and influence to do so. The biggest companies in US history existed back when the US had the least regulations in place. That was the era of the robber baron and so-called captains of industry who held more power than the President...
Certainly, there are some cases where the government raises the barriers of entry and stifles competition, but they are in the minority.
That's quite an unequal bargaining table, stacked substantially in favor of the employer.
Laissez Faire capitalism was tried and failed in the US nearly a decade ago, precisely because the individual has such minuscule bargaining power compared to a large company.
It wasn't the free-market and contract law that ended sweatshops in the developed world.
Why is it that "tech workers" are virtually the only group singled out for getting the shaft on overtime pay.
Because wage laws were designed for "blue collar" workers almost exclusively. "White collar" jobs were exempt because those were mostly managers and executives who got payed plenty, anyhow, and those jobs didn't translate into hours of labor precisely either.
IT is just what happened to come along and dramatically expanded the pool of non-union, white collar jobs, which didn't fall under most wage laws. Now, companies are accustomed to screwing over their IT staff, and there's a lot of inertia against changing that.
Clearly, because Linux, FreeBSD, etc. are capable of running on "any system," even one where voltage levels are below the required specs or PCI buses don't actually work according to spec.
PSUs have voltage regulators in them, and control circuitry to ensure that the power levels are good, and to signal that information to the motherboard. I've worked, in-depth, with probably over 1,000 PC PSUs by now, and I've never yet seen one that would signal POWER GOOD, yet provide voltages substantially out-of-spec. Perhaps that could happen when over-loading a PSU, but I suspect, even then, it would cut off all power immediately, rather than providing substantially bad power.
I'm not sure what you mean about PCI buses that "don't actually work". I will say that decent operating systems tolerate momentary loss of many components without locking up the system, and can often continue to utilize the hardware once it has come back on-line. I've seen flaky drivers on Linux that, over time, corrupt a device, but there, re-loading the driver usually resets the device, and allows it to continue to be utilized.
Cheap-ass power supplies that don't actually deliver 12V, caps with bad fluid, or shoddy connectors don't happen?
They do, indeed. I've seen plenty of them.
However, those are clear, almost always unmistakable and non-transitory events. In other words, a PC with a bad capacitor in the motherboard or PSU will continue to work rock solidly, right up until it doesn't... then the system locks-up hard, and in the majority of such cases, will not power-on again. In the minority, it will only last a few more days.
Low-end PC hardware isn't rock-solid, but it's infinitely more reliable than the vast majority of people, and absolutely any Windows user, would ever believe. 99.9%+ of "computer" flakiness people are familiar with, are software bugs with Windows. Of course, that 'software' may be the drivers provided by the hardware manufacturer, but that's a separate topic entirely, and Microsoft i largely to blame for that, as well.
As I said before, you're more than welcome to crucify VIA for providing terrible drivers. I've said nothing, one way or the other about that. However, the suggestion that their (or any other) PC hardware is responsible for ANYTHING anyone is describing is clearly, provably false.
Save $10, and in exchange you got to deal with chipsets that often had fundamental flaws, known bugs, and drivers that fixed some problems while causing others.
I have yet to see PC hardware with "fundamental flaws". Load up Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al. on any system, and it's 100% rock solid. And don't tell me about "workarounds in Linux", because I've damn well run Slackware3.3 (and OpenBSD2x) on the latest PC hardware without problems (don't ask), so I have a pretty damn good amount of information and context on which to draw my conclusions. This is as opposed to Windows users, which fall into all manner of baseless rituals due to the absolute random and inconsistent behavior, due entirely to the OS.
The very idea that PC hardware is (practically ever) unstable is a purely Windows-based myth. Microsoft refuses to acknowledge Windows has any bugs, EVER, so they blame the hardware OEM for it, and people buy the bullshit. Similarly, Windows is such a complete, monolithic black-box, that even very advanced MS pros find themselves sacrificing virgin goats, and falling into just about myth that comes their way, in a vain, placebo-like attempt to control the lack of control that is Windows.
Now, if you want to say that VIA, SiS, et al. write horrible drivers for Windows that negatively affect stability, I won't argue with you, although I must admit, I only very rarely see such things, and when I do, it's just as often from Intel... Of course, YMMV.
Rather than using a regular handset or obtaining a nice business phone with a headset and speakerphone, I would like to use my PC's modem in conjunction with a normal PC headset and soundcard.
What?
You find yourself in need of a $10 headset for your telephone, so, of course, your first reaction is to dedicate your far more expensive, terribly power wasting, and necessarily less-reliable computer to the otherwise unimaginably simple job... It makes perfect sense!
the point is that Apple sells them because they are profitable for Apple, so on the balance, they aren't profitable for Apple customers.
This isn't necessarily true. You're acting like Apple is just some random 3rd party company offering insurance. But they're not. They are the OEM, and as such, have access to parts at cost, skilled and experienced labor, schematics, and an otherwise huge knowledge base for the product.
In other words: you may be getting parts under warranty that would retail for more than the warranty, yet Apple may still be turning a profit, either because their unit costs are low, or perhaps because they spend $5 to replace a capacitor and refurbish your busted motherboard, which they give to someone else who paid $200 for a warranty...
I saw this first hand with cheap-junk (MAG-brand) monitors at Best Buy. The things wouldn't last a year, and even when I took it to my local TV repair shop and paid a $20 testing fee, they couldn't figure it out with a basic check, and couldn't get specs from the manufacturer. So the second time around I got a $50 3-year warranty on the monitor. Brought in the monitor twice, they shipped it to their service facility, (where they no doubt have the specs and equipment) checked it out, and fixed the lose solder joints, burnt out components, etc. Cost to them? Perhaps $20? Meanwhile, I would have had to spend $300+ to buy new ones. And for the record, yes, I did wise-up, and went with another brand, at another store, which has gone for many years without needing warranty service.
Side-note: I was considering Viewsonic, due to their 3-year warranty, but it turned out that didn't include any of the reasonably-priced ones you'd find in stores, which seems an awfully big red flag... I hear HP in particularly is very good about providing service documentation for all their monitors. But I digress.
I find the same thing with hard drive manufacturers. When you cross-ship a HDD, the "deposit" fee put on your credit card is less than it would cost you to buy a similar (refurb) drive anywhere else. They may not be making nearly as much profit as a retail sale, but it's presumably still more than it cost them to repair, so still a net profit, versus a consumer tossing it in the trash, and a big savings for the customer who would otherwise have to buy a new, retail drive. Everyone is happy.
train:Leave LA Monday, arrive Chicago Thursday, miss meeting, lose client, lose job,
If you're too stupid to realize a train is going to take longer than a jet, and don't even bother to look-up the schedule, you really DESERVE to lose your job. That takes "incompetence" to a whole new level.
You have a point that ExxonMobile isn't the entirety of Standard Oil, however, it makes up a very large portion of it.
Standard Oil was broken up far more completely than Ma Bell, and although all the parts were larger merged into larger entities, they've not reformed with anywhere near the coherency than the baby bells have reformed.
However, you've gone off the track on this point.
With the Baby Bells, we ended up with two behemoths, and a few tiny also-rans.
With Standard Oil, we have one giant chunk in ExxonMobile, and a couple competitors in Chevron and BP which aren't even half the size. If the latter two should merge, the Standard Oil breakup will be in EXACTLY the same situation as the Ma Bell breakup. ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, and the rest aren't even on the radar.
Eh, they seem to be doing better than Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, and I would even say Ma Bell.
Standard Oil was renamed to "Exxon", and recently posted the largest annual profits of ANY company, EVER.
Carnegie Steel became US Steel; now USX. It remains the single largest steel producer in the country. It certainly has slipped a long way from it's historic highs of world domination, but it took almost a century, nowhere nearly as quickly as IBM.
Much like the terminator, Ma Bell's shattered pieces have slowly been coming back together for the past few decades. What's worse, she's a badder bitch now than she ever was before... Much like with any disease, as the host got weaker, the viruses took over, and prospered.
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That's idiotic.
I replaced the alternator's on my mother's Buick, as well as my sister's Honda at about the same time...
With the Buick, the alternator was on the top of the engine, just behind the block, and very easy to do.
With the Honda, you have to jack up the car, TAKE THE WHEEL OFF, remove the splash guard, slide under the car on your back, feel around for the bolt on the opposite/top-side of the alternator, loosen it in 1/16th turn increments because the clearance is so small, etc., etc. Then when you get it out, you get to do the same thing in reverse to install the new one.
And before anyone starts, both are mid-sized cars.
Any kind.
It's called a hypothetical.
You are assuming that the world will forever stay as peaceful as it is today, which is a horrendous bet.
So that France doesn't decide to nuke Spain / Italy / Algeria when a border dispute gets a little too hot for comfort...
If you're going to allow unlimited drug use (immediately eliminating all genetic difference between men and women) why not just skip strait to the conclusion???
Cheetahs in track and field.
Dolphins in water polo and freestyle swims.
etc.
With unlimited drugs and genetic engineering, it's only a matter of time before athletes start growing extra pairs of legs, gills, fins, etc. With a few more advancements, it's going to be extremely difficult to determine if a participant qualifies as "human" anymore.
The delineation between amateur and professional was always a VERY grey area, and extremely hard to prove.
Do gifts or discounts of sporting equipment apply?
Does "incidentally" wearing a logo mean you're a pro, and never-mind that the company didn't really pay you anything? Or vise versa, what if it's a scam to get the logo out there, which you only get paid for, 10 years later?
Does the announcement that you're from X city and supported by Y school, thereby increasing tourism for the city, and enrollment for the school, count?
- If so, that pretty much eliminates all avenues of non-professional sponsorship and you're paying out of pocket to try for a medal.
- If not, then why should more direct "sponsorship" matter?
And most importantly, how do you account for the difference in economies of communist and socialist countries? They may never receive a penny, while still living in better comforts than a professional athlete in a capitalistic country.
But I digress. There is really no such question about doping. Either you are, or you aren't. Ditto for gender. I fail to see any equivalent between these two rules.
You're still talking about athletes, right? Because this could just as easily apply to a top-paid expert in ANY field.
Your brain... It's affected by genetics, every bit as much as your muscles are. Of course, someone's going to chime-in to say that education can have a huge and equalizing effect on intelligence, versus being purely genetics... but the same is true for physical abilities as well... Substantial training can make anyone ridiculously strong, it's only at the very, very top of athletics that an average person can't reach without a major genetic advantage.
Now, there aren't exactly a lot of engineers making 30 million a year, but there are some. There aren't many athletes that make it up to that pay scale, either, we just see them a lot. Engineering isn't so much of a spectator's sport.
"Considerable" is a very vague term. It may have been significant compared to previous years, but there was a very, very small amount of government interference by today's standards.
One of their examples is the creation of the First/Second Banks of the United States, which is a miniscule level of "intervention", and only directly relevant to the banking industry, such as it was.
The "intervention" in that time period was few and far between, and more to the point, only directly impacted a few industries. You could also point to the railroads for another example. But it's very difficult to claim that the economy wasn't Laissez Faire, just because of a few exceptions. In practice, nothing ever quite matches up perfectly with theory.
Indeed. But that's not the same as "an employee and an employer agree[ing]". Perhaps more to the point, though, Unions have practically no foothold in the tech industry right now.
That's completely and totally wrong. In a free market, big companies get bigger, because they have the capital and influence to do so. The biggest companies in US history existed back when the US had the least regulations in place. That was the era of the robber baron and so-called captains of industry who held more power than the President...
Certainly, there are some cases where the government raises the barriers of entry and stifles competition, but they are in the minority.
Oops:
Laissez Faire capitalism was tried and failed in the US nearly a century ago
That's quite an unequal bargaining table, stacked substantially in favor of the employer.
Laissez Faire capitalism was tried and failed in the US nearly a decade ago, precisely because the individual has such minuscule bargaining power compared to a large company.
It wasn't the free-market and contract law that ended sweatshops in the developed world.
Because wage laws were designed for "blue collar" workers almost exclusively. "White collar" jobs were exempt because those were mostly managers and executives who got payed plenty, anyhow, and those jobs didn't translate into hours of labor precisely either.
IT is just what happened to come along and dramatically expanded the pool of non-union, white collar jobs, which didn't fall under most wage laws. Now, companies are accustomed to screwing over their IT staff, and there's a lot of inertia against changing that.
Defects are not "fundamental" (design) flaws.
PSUs have voltage regulators in them, and control circuitry to ensure that the power levels are good, and to signal that information to the motherboard. I've worked, in-depth, with probably over 1,000 PC PSUs by now, and I've never yet seen one that would signal POWER GOOD, yet provide voltages substantially out-of-spec. Perhaps that could happen when over-loading a PSU, but I suspect, even then, it would cut off all power immediately, rather than providing substantially bad power.
I'm not sure what you mean about PCI buses that "don't actually work". I will say that decent operating systems tolerate momentary loss of many components without locking up the system, and can often continue to utilize the hardware once it has come back on-line. I've seen flaky drivers on Linux that, over time, corrupt a device, but there, re-loading the driver usually resets the device, and allows it to continue to be utilized.
They do, indeed. I've seen plenty of them.
However, those are clear, almost always unmistakable and non-transitory events. In other words, a PC with a bad capacitor in the motherboard or PSU will continue to work rock solidly, right up until it doesn't... then the system locks-up hard, and in the majority of such cases, will not power-on again. In the minority, it will only last a few more days.
Low-end PC hardware isn't rock-solid, but it's infinitely more reliable than the vast majority of people, and absolutely any Windows user, would ever believe. 99.9%+ of "computer" flakiness people are familiar with, are software bugs with Windows. Of course, that 'software' may be the drivers provided by the hardware manufacturer, but that's a separate topic entirely, and Microsoft i largely to blame for that, as well.
As I said before, you're more than welcome to crucify VIA for providing terrible drivers. I've said nothing, one way or the other about that. However, the suggestion that their (or any other) PC hardware is responsible for ANYTHING anyone is describing is clearly, provably false.
You mean ARM ?
Yes, it's a scary world we live in.
I have yet to see PC hardware with "fundamental flaws". Load up Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al. on any system, and it's 100% rock solid. And don't tell me about "workarounds in Linux", because I've damn well run Slackware3.3 (and OpenBSD2x) on the latest PC hardware without problems (don't ask), so I have a pretty damn good amount of information and context on which to draw my conclusions. This is as opposed to Windows users, which fall into all manner of baseless rituals due to the absolute random and inconsistent behavior, due entirely to the OS.
The very idea that PC hardware is (practically ever) unstable is a purely Windows-based myth. Microsoft refuses to acknowledge Windows has any bugs, EVER, so they blame the hardware OEM for it, and people buy the bullshit. Similarly, Windows is such a complete, monolithic black-box, that even very advanced MS pros find themselves sacrificing virgin goats, and falling into just about myth that comes their way, in a vain, placebo-like attempt to control the lack of control that is Windows.
Now, if you want to say that VIA, SiS, et al. write horrible drivers for Windows that negatively affect stability, I won't argue with you, although I must admit, I only very rarely see such things, and when I do, it's just as often from Intel... Of course, YMMV.
What?
You find yourself in need of a $10 headset for your telephone, so, of course, your first reaction is to dedicate your far more expensive, terribly power wasting, and necessarily less-reliable computer to the otherwise unimaginably simple job... It makes perfect sense!
Yes, it's a real shame there's no possible way to record a live event, and wait to broadcast it later in the day.
Yes, but that was last year. This year profits are down by a monumental 85%, despite ridership having increased by 19%.
No. They are related.
Why do you think its existence precludes it from (later) becoming a meme?
Does the existence of Zero Wing mean that "All Your Base" isn't an internet meme? Ditto for "The Cake Is A Lie", cat photos, etc.
Mustangs predate automobiles, so how can it be considered a car?
This isn't necessarily true. You're acting like Apple is just some random 3rd party company offering insurance. But they're not. They are the OEM, and as such, have access to parts at cost, skilled and experienced labor, schematics, and an otherwise huge knowledge base for the product.
In other words: you may be getting parts under warranty that would retail for more than the warranty, yet Apple may still be turning a profit, either because their unit costs are low, or perhaps because they spend $5 to replace a capacitor and refurbish your busted motherboard, which they give to someone else who paid $200 for a warranty...
I saw this first hand with cheap-junk (MAG-brand) monitors at Best Buy. The things wouldn't last a year, and even when I took it to my local TV repair shop and paid a $20 testing fee, they couldn't figure it out with a basic check, and couldn't get specs from the manufacturer. So the second time around I got a $50 3-year warranty on the monitor. Brought in the monitor twice, they shipped it to their service facility, (where they no doubt have the specs and equipment) checked it out, and fixed the lose solder joints, burnt out components, etc. Cost to them? Perhaps $20? Meanwhile, I would have had to spend $300+ to buy new ones. And for the record, yes, I did wise-up, and went with another brand, at another store, which has gone for many years without needing warranty service.
Side-note: I was considering Viewsonic, due to their 3-year warranty, but it turned out that didn't include any of the reasonably-priced ones you'd find in stores, which seems an awfully big red flag... I hear HP in particularly is very good about providing service documentation for all their monitors. But I digress.
I find the same thing with hard drive manufacturers. When you cross-ship a HDD, the "deposit" fee put on your credit card is less than it would cost you to buy a similar (refurb) drive anywhere else. They may not be making nearly as much profit as a retail sale, but it's presumably still more than it cost them to repair, so still a net profit, versus a consumer tossing it in the trash, and a big savings for the customer who would otherwise have to buy a new, retail drive. Everyone is happy.
If you're too stupid to realize a train is going to take longer than a jet, and don't even bother to look-up the schedule, you really DESERVE to lose your job. That takes "incompetence" to a whole new level.
You have a point that ExxonMobile isn't the entirety of Standard Oil, however, it makes up a very large portion of it.
However, you've gone off the track on this point.
With the Baby Bells, we ended up with two behemoths, and a few tiny also-rans.
With Standard Oil, we have one giant chunk in ExxonMobile, and a couple competitors in Chevron and BP which aren't even half the size. If the latter two should merge, the Standard Oil breakup will be in EXACTLY the same situation as the Ma Bell breakup. ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, and the rest aren't even on the radar.
You convince them to get back into the PC business...
Standard Oil was renamed to "Exxon", and recently posted the largest annual profits of ANY company, EVER.
Carnegie Steel became US Steel; now USX. It remains the single largest steel producer in the country. It certainly has slipped a long way from it's historic highs of world domination, but it took almost a century, nowhere nearly as quickly as IBM.
Much like the terminator, Ma Bell's shattered pieces have slowly been coming back together for the past few decades. What's worse, she's a badder bitch now than she ever was before... Much like with any disease, as the host got weaker, the viruses took over, and prospered.