I jumped the other way, actually. I wanted to have a grandfathered T-mobile plan on AT&T's network.:D
But now that I made the switch I am so happy. I have had a couple of coverage issues since making the switch, like not being able to get a signal when I was in Yosemite, but I'm saving so much on my bill, and the customer service is so much better, it's just not a big deal to me.
"Stuck with" AT&T huh? I feel your pain; I was stuck on a family plan for ten years with that God-awful mess that is AT&T, because everyone in the family kept renewing their two-year contracts at different times, and everyone was afraid to take the early termination fee hit.
Finally I just did the math and legwork myself and forced the rest of the family to take the plunge with me; turns out that even with ETFs and having to buy our handsets outright we're going to save hundreds of dollars over the next two years by switching to T-mobile. Free at last, free at last!
Apple is a software and design company. It used to be a hardware company, but earlier this decade Jobs realized that hardware is largely commoditized, and the vast majority of consumers are largely unaware of the parts that aren't commoditized. So, they outsourced their hardware manufacture to China and turned to software (and, arguably, marketing) as their biggest differentiating factor.
Dell, on the other hand, still thinks it's a hardware company, but it's a hardware company that has outsourced its hardware design and manufacture to China, which at this point means it really is nothing but a sticker being attached to commodity hardware. HP is the same way, although Meg Whitman seems to be trying to turn that around. We'll see if she manages it.
I own a netbook myself, and for the same reasons (my brother's 14-inch Envy is a nice bit of hardware, but I'm not lugging around a 5.5 lb laptop, plus charger, when I can carry around a 3 lb netbook and do everything I need to with an all-day battery), but frankly we're a niche crowd. Most people aren't trying to code or type a novel while riding the bus/train to work, and so don't need something that is both extremely portable and conducive to content creation while on the move.
People like us are going to eventually be served by power-user tablets, like the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, rather than low-end netbooks. Dell and HP just don't get the margins or volume on low-end 'books to serve our needs, so it's not surprising that they're exiting that market. Maybe some day they'll learn to build a tablet that doesn't suck, and we'll see them re-enter the tablet market; until then we have smaller upstart companies who are building the products we will need.
The problem is that our systems of government are hundreds of years old, and haven't been updated to match the times. Our "first past the post" electoral system is an 18th century construct, and hasn't been updated to match the times. It means that people are forced to vote for one of two major political parties or have their vote basically not count. It allows small errors in voting to have outsized effects on the outcome (the 2000 presidential vote), or for a candidate who doesn't receive the majority of votes to be elected (1996, 2000, AND 2004 presidential vote).
We need to fundamentally alter the voting system to allow minority parties to have more voice. Open primaries and a single transferable vote will help, but proportional representation is probably the best way to go. I'd also like to see the Presidency be split into a five-person "Executive Council", one of whom has to stand for election every year, and for Supreme Court justices to either have fifteen year terms, or have to stand for confirmation by popular vote every eight years.
Remember that most Chinese believe that it's for the country's good that government tries to keep some control.
I'm Chinese and I despise sinophile apologist fucks like you. You have no right to speak for anyone.
I'm also Chinese and I have to say GP is unfortunately correct. Poll after poll of people actually living in Communist China shows the vast, vast majority think that the government should play a role in "protecting the people from dangerous ideas" and the like. They're fools, and they're wrong, but they're out there, just like the lunatic Fox News fringe exists here in the US (which unfortunately makes up a large enough voting bloc to win a majority of Congress in 2010).
You can be as indignant as you want, but don't ignore reality just because it disgusts you; that's kind of what those other people that you'd rather ignore are doing.
I don't remember rebates or subsidies from the government on computers for consumers. The industry was initially funded largely by the government with defense and other agencies purchases, but never any subsidies. The government did not make computers cheap or efficient or powerful, consumer demand did.
"Defense and other agencies purchases" is a subsidy! More than that, though, just because you don't remember doesn't mean it didn't happen: NASA, DARPA and the military built the computer industry as part of the massive funding binges that were the space race and the Cold War push for intelligence gathering (spy satellites, code breaking, etc). It took decades before the 1980s made the personal computer profitable from a consumer standpoint; before that it was all--or almost all--government supported "purchases" ie. subsidies.
Now we're in a fight for the future with China, and instead of investing in technology we're spending a NASA-sized piece of the budget on air-conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lambasting Solyndra because it was left to fend for itself against a Chinese trade war machine. You think China isn't already thinking this way? Look at rare earth metals; China spent a decade killing the market by subsidizing their mines, and now that they have a monopoly they're using it to extract concessions from Japan by "restricting" exports.
Politicians bleat about "not wanting to start a trade war." Start one? We're in one; we're just losing!
The FCC doesn't allow one company to own both a handset manufacturer and a carrier. That was one of the rules they came up with the first time AT&T got broken up, and it's worked very well for us (we would never have had the fax machine or higher-performance modems otherwise). This was one of the main reasons I was disappointed at Google buying Motorola; they could have bought a telcom instead and broken up that oligopoly, but they basically had their hand forced by Motorola because they needed the patents to defend against Android lawsuits.
I know Google isn't evil yet, but it's not a good idea to give them free passes on the rules.
I'd love to believe that, but a modern politician is a master at turning a blind eye to the blatantly obvious. It's only gotten worse with time, as the amounts of money have increased exponentially in the last twenty years.
Upton Sinclair had it right: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
As someone who is fairly right-leaning on economic issues, the way I was hoping this would work out would be for the Democrats to put their thinking caps on and look at the numbers, see that the money isn't there and never will be there, and cave on entitlement reform in exchange for the Republicans caving on tax increases because they need to give the Democrats something to hang their hats on. Instead, Democrats refused to budge on entitlements, leaving Republicans nothing to take back to their districts, and vice versa on tax increases.
Unfortunately, they did: even the earliest and most left-leaning deficit reduction plan included just as many cuts as tax increases, and the latest included more than three times as many cuts as tax increases, and Republicans still blocked it, because the proposal included tax increases on the wealthy, which is a complete non-starter for them.
Because you're rampantly paranoid?! Look, this practice is obviously wrong and needs to change, but if you're really that concerned about being tracked you are either:
a) involved in nefarious activity
b) batshit tinfoil hat paranoid
or c) concerned that you may at some point in the future be in a country where such activities are necessary. Given the way that governments and corporations have been expanding their powers and decriminalizing their actions, there may come a point, not too far in the future, where such paranoid actions are necessary to keep from being made into some organization's indentured servant.
No, it just means that the giant commercial banks are going to get sneaky with hidden fees, rather than up-front screwing you.
The problem isn't regulation, or lack thereof, it's that banks have become "too big to fail." The solution to that isn't some Tea Party craziness of cutting spending in a recession, it's to take the money away from the banks that have gotten too big and give them to a bunch of smaller banks, because banking actually is a free market, unlike say internet service or government contractors. If banks have to work more competing for your dollar, then they won't have as much time and money to spend bribing politicians and playing silly games with the stock market.
Oh, I see what the problem is: you work in government contracting. "Contracting" is what you get when you put anti-government people in charge of the government, that is, a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to make government as inefficient and wasteful as possible while extracting as much money to outside corporations as possible.
Contracting begins when some pointy-haired politician decides he doesn't like a functioning piece of government and decides to dismantle it. He fires all the productive people, and tasks the rest with drawing up the most byzantine requirements possible, such that the contract can only be fulfilled by one firm, somehow unsurprisingly the one who just brib--I mean lobbied their way into said pointy-haired politician's good graces. The company gives a lowball estimate for the first X months worth of contract--usually the length of time to the next election--so the politician comes up smelling like roses, then suddenly the company uses some damn excuse to double or triple its rates, but by then the government has fired all the workers who used to be able to replace the contractor, so the company keeps getting its money and the government is "forced" to contract out another piece of itself, to "save money."
I'm not surprised that someone in government contracting is cynical about the functioning of government. The company you work for exists for an anti-government politician to carve out a monopoly-shaped piece of a government organization, hand it to your company, and leave it to exploit that monopoly to make its stakeholders wealthy enough to support that politician's re-election. I'd be cynical too, if I were in your shoes.
That's why I don't get the tea party hate, the ones who want to stop bail outs and listen to their people.
B B B BUT THEYRE RACIST!! goebels was right, repeat it enough times.
The OWS has more in common with the tea party than democrats.
The Tea Party had it right by being angry; they just had it wrong by being angry at the wrong people. Tea Partiers are mostly people who bought into the great lie that governments, and unions, are always inefficient and can't do anything right. They took that lie and ran with it to the "obvious" conclusion: if there's a problem in the US, then the government and the unions must be the cause of it, and if we get rid of them, thereby handing all our power and wealth to the only large collective entities left (corporations), then we'll solve all our problems!
Unfortunately for the Tea Party, their central assumption isn't true, and so their conclusion is necessarily false. It remains to be seen if OWS comes up with any better ideas.
What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.
What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."
Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up. These days shareholders are largely incapable of enforcing a long-term perspective on executive officers; the rules these days are written by boards more interested in hiring a CEO for a few quarters to juice profits, siphon as much money as they can, and let the CEO take a multi-billion dollar golden parachute to the next sucker play. This quarter-to-quarter thinking isn't fostered by pensioners investing in index funds for 20-30 years for retirement, but by the giant money-printers of Wall Street. The whole system needs to be fixed, and executive compensation is a small, but important piece of the puzzle.
Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.
Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare. Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore, with their Fox News propaganda machines and well-funded astroturf campaigns, but it won't go away just because they keep denying it's there.
No, there were still forty Republicans around then; the difference was that one of them called himself "Independent" and went to their clubhouse meetings. If it weren't for Joe Lieberman then we would have a public option today.
He's already doing this with that jobs bill. Nothing in there is controversial; at this point, the Republicans are voting against teachers and infrastructure projects. Doing the same with a software patent bill, something too technical for anyone but the Slashdot crowd to automatically know how important it is, would only dilute the message.
You really are drinking the Kool-Aide, Look *IF* it was the GOPs fault then Reid would have put the Jobs bill to the senate floor, let it fail in the House.
Check your facts. Reid did introduce the bill; it was filibustered. Sound familiar? Ever since 2008 the Republicans have been circling the wagons and killing anything that crosses their desk, even routine appointments to mid-level executive departments. That's why the public option was trashed, why meaningful banking reform was replaced by useless drivel, and why we can't have nice things like a AAA credit rating or disclosure of campaign donors (another bill killed by Republican opposition).
I'm not a huge fan of Obama, although I have to admit he has been right about much of his foreign policy decisions, but the Republicans in Congress/Senate these days deserve nothing but contempt. The first step in truly reforming Washington is to get rid of everyone with an (R) in front of his name (the second is to get rid of almost everyone with a (D) in front of their name).
Forty Republicans in the Senate circling the wagons and preventing anything from being done (more fillabusters in two years than any other time in American history; the Obama administration can even get non-controversial middle managers confirmed.)
Is it worse than the global menu that Mac OS has had for the past two and a half decades? This was around before X, let alone before Mac OS X.
It is, because it hides from you. You don't get to see the menu options until you mouseover or long-press Alt. Even that wouldn't be such a bad idea, except for the fact that the whole point of a global menu is to follow Fitts' Law, which says the corners of the screen are sometimes faster to get to (because the screen edge makes the mouse target easy to hit), and the new global menus are spaced far enough away from the top left corner to lose any of that advantage, giving you a menu that's further away, just as narrow a target as the old "local" menus, and hide from you. Bravo.
It would have been far smarter for the global menu thing to only apply to maximized windows, or perhaps only windows whose title bars are merged with the top panel. It would have been smarter to have the menus merge all the way to the top corner, or to put something else there other than the close button (which is still offset enough that you have to aim at it specifically, rather than just wave at the upper-left corner without looking). And so the debate continues to rage.
Ubuntu Classic (that is, the Gnome 2-based interface) is gone as of 11.10, replaced with a 2D version of Unity. To get Gnome back you need to install gnome-fallback from the repos.
And that's basically the takeaway from all of this: in seeking to give an Apple-like "It just works, so you don't need to customize it and so we're removing all the customization options," Shuttleworth gave us a buggy, slow interface that sort of works some of the time, and no recourse but to ditch the window manager for KDE of Gnome or something.
Why, because Greece is so corrupt that half of their businesses don't pay taxes (gee, where have I heard that before), or Spain has something like a 50+% high school dropout rate? European countries have a lot of problems, but their commitment to a healthy populace is absolutely not one of them. France and Germany are economic powerhouses, and both of them have universal health care. For them it's a competitive advantage, just like American bankruptcy laws: people were encouraged to take risks, like starting a business or changing careers, with the knowledge that their families' health is still protected, regardless of the outcome.
You know, I'd be a lot more concerned about this kind of thing if we weren't hearing Slashdot stories crying wolf practically every day. I'm just not impressed with people trying to call Google evil anymore; none of these so-called revelations have panned out so far, so how likely is this one to go any differently?
No, the skeptics are generally asking, "Why should I care about a problem that won't cause serious problems until after I'm dead? I mean, I'll be able to live out my life in comfort; who cares about anyone else?"
Slashdot Mirror
I jumped the other way, actually. I wanted to have a grandfathered T-mobile plan on AT&T's network. :D
But now that I made the switch I am so happy. I have had a couple of coverage issues since making the switch, like not being able to get a signal when I was in Yosemite, but I'm saving so much on my bill, and the customer service is so much better, it's just not a big deal to me.
"Stuck with" AT&T huh? I feel your pain; I was stuck on a family plan for ten years with that God-awful mess that is AT&T, because everyone in the family kept renewing their two-year contracts at different times, and everyone was afraid to take the early termination fee hit.
Finally I just did the math and legwork myself and forced the rest of the family to take the plunge with me; turns out that even with ETFs and having to buy our handsets outright we're going to save hundreds of dollars over the next two years by switching to T-mobile. Free at last, free at last!
Apple is a software and design company. It used to be a hardware company, but earlier this decade Jobs realized that hardware is largely commoditized, and the vast majority of consumers are largely unaware of the parts that aren't commoditized. So, they outsourced their hardware manufacture to China and turned to software (and, arguably, marketing) as their biggest differentiating factor.
Dell, on the other hand, still thinks it's a hardware company, but it's a hardware company that has outsourced its hardware design and manufacture to China, which at this point means it really is nothing but a sticker being attached to commodity hardware. HP is the same way, although Meg Whitman seems to be trying to turn that around. We'll see if she manages it.
I own a netbook myself, and for the same reasons (my brother's 14-inch Envy is a nice bit of hardware, but I'm not lugging around a 5.5 lb laptop, plus charger, when I can carry around a 3 lb netbook and do everything I need to with an all-day battery), but frankly we're a niche crowd. Most people aren't trying to code or type a novel while riding the bus/train to work, and so don't need something that is both extremely portable and conducive to content creation while on the move.
People like us are going to eventually be served by power-user tablets, like the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, rather than low-end netbooks. Dell and HP just don't get the margins or volume on low-end 'books to serve our needs, so it's not surprising that they're exiting that market. Maybe some day they'll learn to build a tablet that doesn't suck, and we'll see them re-enter the tablet market; until then we have smaller upstart companies who are building the products we will need.
The problem is that our systems of government are hundreds of years old, and haven't been updated to match the times. Our "first past the post" electoral system is an 18th century construct, and hasn't been updated to match the times. It means that people are forced to vote for one of two major political parties or have their vote basically not count. It allows small errors in voting to have outsized effects on the outcome (the 2000 presidential vote), or for a candidate who doesn't receive the majority of votes to be elected (1996, 2000, AND 2004 presidential vote).
We need to fundamentally alter the voting system to allow minority parties to have more voice. Open primaries and a single transferable vote will help, but proportional representation is probably the best way to go. I'd also like to see the Presidency be split into a five-person "Executive Council", one of whom has to stand for election every year, and for Supreme Court justices to either have fifteen year terms, or have to stand for confirmation by popular vote every eight years.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a mail truck full of CDs (or DVDs, or flash/hard drives, etc)... although it's just been cut in half now.
Remember that most Chinese believe that it's for the country's good that government tries to keep some control.
I'm Chinese and I despise sinophile apologist fucks like you. You have no right to speak for anyone.
I'm also Chinese and I have to say GP is unfortunately correct. Poll after poll of people actually living in Communist China shows the vast, vast majority think that the government should play a role in "protecting the people from dangerous ideas" and the like. They're fools, and they're wrong, but they're out there, just like the lunatic Fox News fringe exists here in the US (which unfortunately makes up a large enough voting bloc to win a majority of Congress in 2010).
You can be as indignant as you want, but don't ignore reality just because it disgusts you; that's kind of what those other people that you'd rather ignore are doing.
I don't remember rebates or subsidies from the government on computers for consumers. The industry was initially funded largely by the government with defense and other agencies purchases, but never any subsidies. The government did not make computers cheap or efficient or powerful, consumer demand did.
"Defense and other agencies purchases" is a subsidy! More than that, though, just because you don't remember doesn't mean it didn't happen: NASA, DARPA and the military built the computer industry as part of the massive funding binges that were the space race and the Cold War push for intelligence gathering (spy satellites, code breaking, etc). It took decades before the 1980s made the personal computer profitable from a consumer standpoint; before that it was all--or almost all--government supported "purchases" ie. subsidies.
Now we're in a fight for the future with China, and instead of investing in technology we're spending a NASA-sized piece of the budget on air-conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lambasting Solyndra because it was left to fend for itself against a Chinese trade war machine. You think China isn't already thinking this way? Look at rare earth metals; China spent a decade killing the market by subsidizing their mines, and now that they have a monopoly they're using it to extract concessions from Japan by "restricting" exports.
Politicians bleat about "not wanting to start a trade war." Start one? We're in one; we're just losing!
The FCC doesn't allow one company to own both a handset manufacturer and a carrier. That was one of the rules they came up with the first time AT&T got broken up, and it's worked very well for us (we would never have had the fax machine or higher-performance modems otherwise). This was one of the main reasons I was disappointed at Google buying Motorola; they could have bought a telcom instead and broken up that oligopoly, but they basically had their hand forced by Motorola because they needed the patents to defend against Android lawsuits.
I know Google isn't evil yet, but it's not a good idea to give them free passes on the rules.
I'd love to believe that, but a modern politician is a master at turning a blind eye to the blatantly obvious. It's only gotten worse with time, as the amounts of money have increased exponentially in the last twenty years.
Upton Sinclair had it right: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
As someone who is fairly right-leaning on economic issues, the way I was hoping this would work out would be for the Democrats to put their thinking caps on and look at the numbers, see that the money isn't there and never will be there, and cave on entitlement reform in exchange for the Republicans caving on tax increases because they need to give the Democrats something to hang their hats on. Instead, Democrats refused to budge on entitlements, leaving Republicans nothing to take back to their districts, and vice versa on tax increases.
Unfortunately, they did: even the earliest and most left-leaning deficit reduction plan included just as many cuts as tax increases, and the latest included more than three times as many cuts as tax increases, and Republicans still blocked it, because the proposal included tax increases on the wealthy, which is a complete non-starter for them.
Because you're rampantly paranoid?! Look, this practice is obviously wrong and needs to change, but if you're really that concerned about being tracked you are either:
a) involved in nefarious activity
b) batshit tinfoil hat paranoid
or c) concerned that you may at some point in the future be in a country where such activities are necessary. Given the way that governments and corporations have been expanding their powers and decriminalizing their actions, there may come a point, not too far in the future, where such paranoid actions are necessary to keep from being made into some organization's indentured servant.
No, it just means that the giant commercial banks are going to get sneaky with hidden fees, rather than up-front screwing you.
The problem isn't regulation, or lack thereof, it's that banks have become "too big to fail." The solution to that isn't some Tea Party craziness of cutting spending in a recession, it's to take the money away from the banks that have gotten too big and give them to a bunch of smaller banks, because banking actually is a free market, unlike say internet service or government contractors. If banks have to work more competing for your dollar, then they won't have as much time and money to spend bribing politicians and playing silly games with the stock market.
Oh, I see what the problem is: you work in government contracting. "Contracting" is what you get when you put anti-government people in charge of the government, that is, a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to make government as inefficient and wasteful as possible while extracting as much money to outside corporations as possible.
Contracting begins when some pointy-haired politician decides he doesn't like a functioning piece of government and decides to dismantle it. He fires all the productive people, and tasks the rest with drawing up the most byzantine requirements possible, such that the contract can only be fulfilled by one firm, somehow unsurprisingly the one who just brib--I mean lobbied their way into said pointy-haired politician's good graces. The company gives a lowball estimate for the first X months worth of contract--usually the length of time to the next election--so the politician comes up smelling like roses, then suddenly the company uses some damn excuse to double or triple its rates, but by then the government has fired all the workers who used to be able to replace the contractor, so the company keeps getting its money and the government is "forced" to contract out another piece of itself, to "save money."
I'm not surprised that someone in government contracting is cynical about the functioning of government. The company you work for exists for an anti-government politician to carve out a monopoly-shaped piece of a government organization, hand it to your company, and leave it to exploit that monopoly to make its stakeholders wealthy enough to support that politician's re-election. I'd be cynical too, if I were in your shoes.
Which is sad, because they are in on it too.
That's why I don't get the tea party hate, the ones who want to stop bail outs and listen to their people.
B B B BUT THEYRE RACIST!! goebels was right, repeat it enough times.
The OWS has more in common with the tea party than democrats.
The Tea Party had it right by being angry; they just had it wrong by being angry at the wrong people. Tea Partiers are mostly people who bought into the great lie that governments, and unions, are always inefficient and can't do anything right. They took that lie and ran with it to the "obvious" conclusion: if there's a problem in the US, then the government and the unions must be the cause of it, and if we get rid of them, thereby handing all our power and wealth to the only large collective entities left (corporations), then we'll solve all our problems!
Unfortunately for the Tea Party, their central assumption isn't true, and so their conclusion is necessarily false. It remains to be seen if OWS comes up with any better ideas.
What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.
What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."
Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up. These days shareholders are largely incapable of enforcing a long-term perspective on executive officers; the rules these days are written by boards more interested in hiring a CEO for a few quarters to juice profits, siphon as much money as they can, and let the CEO take a multi-billion dollar golden parachute to the next sucker play. This quarter-to-quarter thinking isn't fostered by pensioners investing in index funds for 20-30 years for retirement, but by the giant money-printers of Wall Street. The whole system needs to be fixed, and executive compensation is a small, but important piece of the puzzle.
Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.
Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare. Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore, with their Fox News propaganda machines and well-funded astroturf campaigns, but it won't go away just because they keep denying it's there.
No, there were still forty Republicans around then; the difference was that one of them called himself "Independent" and went to their clubhouse meetings. If it weren't for Joe Lieberman then we would have a public option today.
He's already doing this with that jobs bill. Nothing in there is controversial; at this point, the Republicans are voting against teachers and infrastructure projects. Doing the same with a software patent bill, something too technical for anyone but the Slashdot crowd to automatically know how important it is, would only dilute the message.
You really are drinking the Kool-Aide, Look *IF* it was the GOPs fault then Reid would have put the Jobs bill to the senate floor, let it fail in the House.
Check your facts. Reid did introduce the bill; it was filibustered. Sound familiar? Ever since 2008 the Republicans have been circling the wagons and killing anything that crosses their desk, even routine appointments to mid-level executive departments. That's why the public option was trashed, why meaningful banking reform was replaced by useless drivel, and why we can't have nice things like a AAA credit rating or disclosure of campaign donors (another bill killed by Republican opposition).
I'm not a huge fan of Obama, although I have to admit he has been right about much of his foreign policy decisions, but the Republicans in Congress/Senate these days deserve nothing but contempt. The first step in truly reforming Washington is to get rid of everyone with an (R) in front of his name (the second is to get rid of almost everyone with a (D) in front of their name).
Forty Republicans in the Senate circling the wagons and preventing anything from being done (more fillabusters in two years than any other time in American history; the Obama administration can even get non-controversial middle managers confirmed.)
Is it worse than the global menu that Mac OS has had for the past two and a half decades? This was around before X, let alone before Mac OS X.
It is, because it hides from you. You don't get to see the menu options until you mouseover or long-press Alt. Even that wouldn't be such a bad idea, except for the fact that the whole point of a global menu is to follow Fitts' Law, which says the corners of the screen are sometimes faster to get to (because the screen edge makes the mouse target easy to hit), and the new global menus are spaced far enough away from the top left corner to lose any of that advantage, giving you a menu that's further away, just as narrow a target as the old "local" menus, and hide from you. Bravo.
It would have been far smarter for the global menu thing to only apply to maximized windows, or perhaps only windows whose title bars are merged with the top panel. It would have been smarter to have the menus merge all the way to the top corner, or to put something else there other than the close button (which is still offset enough that you have to aim at it specifically, rather than just wave at the upper-left corner without looking). And so the debate continues to rage.
Ubuntu Classic (that is, the Gnome 2-based interface) is gone as of 11.10, replaced with a 2D version of Unity. To get Gnome back you need to install gnome-fallback from the repos.
And that's basically the takeaway from all of this: in seeking to give an Apple-like "It just works, so you don't need to customize it and so we're removing all the customization options," Shuttleworth gave us a buggy, slow interface that sort of works some of the time, and no recourse but to ditch the window manager for KDE of Gnome or something.
Why, because Greece is so corrupt that half of their businesses don't pay taxes (gee, where have I heard that before), or Spain has something like a 50+% high school dropout rate? European countries have a lot of problems, but their commitment to a healthy populace is absolutely not one of them. France and Germany are economic powerhouses, and both of them have universal health care. For them it's a competitive advantage, just like American bankruptcy laws: people were encouraged to take risks, like starting a business or changing careers, with the knowledge that their families' health is still protected, regardless of the outcome.
You know, I'd be a lot more concerned about this kind of thing if we weren't hearing Slashdot stories crying wolf practically every day. I'm just not impressed with people trying to call Google evil anymore; none of these so-called revelations have panned out so far, so how likely is this one to go any differently?
No, the skeptics are generally asking, "Why should I care about a problem that won't cause serious problems until after I'm dead? I mean, I'll be able to live out my life in comfort; who cares about anyone else?"