HOWEVER. The launch of the XBOX 360 cannot have faded much from our minds. Shortages. Outrageous prices on eBay. Microsoft taking a loss on the systems anyway. Even though I despise Sony, I have to concede that it would be awfully dumb of them to launch this system at a lower price. They're going to sell out. There's going to be a shortage for months. They might as well take as LITTLE loss as possible on these machines.
Of course Sony will sell out their initial stock, but if they are thinking this way, it will be another nail in their coffin. Why? Preorders. Rather than preorder a PS3 for $600 and wait till one comes in, gamers will just buy a 360 or preorder a Wii.
The value of owning the dominant video standard cannot be overestimated.
But unless they drop the price AND all the bad PR they've gotten over the PS3's pricetag, that's not going to happen. The PS3 was supposed to be the trojan horse that got millions of Blu-Ray players into people's homes. Being able to get both a Wii and a 360 for the price of the high end PS3, consumers will hold off on high def video. Which means that HD-DVD will come in with it's lower cost and take over the market.
You might have a point if the PS3 was the only next gen console out there. Unfortunatly for Sony (and your point) is the fact that you'll be able to buy an Xbox 360 AND a Revolution (I refuse to use the new, stupid name) for the price of the "premium" PS3. Yes, Americans like charging too much money on their credit cards, but they also like "getting a good deal" even if it puts them farther in debt. With out a serious price reduction or a buttload of must-have games, Sony is dead in the water.
Yup. Bit of a racist dick, but ya gotta love the trust-busting.
Dwight Eisenhower
Yup. But next to today's GOP, he'd almost be a communist by now.
Ronald Reagan
No thanks. He had bucketloads of charisma, but not much else. Inventing the multi-trillion dollar defecit and helping to get the God-gun nut-free market jihad rolling weren't his most notable achievements. I would take Reagan on his worst day over Bush on his best day in a heartbeat, however.
When was the last time that the board of directors of Time Warner, General Electric, etc. were writing the on-air scripts and editing film clips and audio?
Straw man. Ever hear of delegation?
The people who do those tasks overwhelmingly identify themselves are liberals
Conservative urban legend. "Studies" that demonstrate this are notoriously flawed.
They'll interview a lawyer/PR spokesperson from the pro-gun control or pro-choice side but not interview a lawyer/PR spokesperson for the other sides,
When. And being pro-choice should be a conservative position as well as a liberal one, as one of the long standing positions of conservatives and the GOP is that the government should stay out of people's private lives. But of course the GOP is now built on top of the God-gun nut-free market jihad, so you'll see this kind of double standards and hypocracy all the time.
And besides if you want to talk about how media covers stories, remmber that the media was overwhelmingly pro-NAFTA and pro globalization, as well as pro-deregulation and pro-big business. CEO's and other businesspoeple outnumber workers interests, such as unions, by thirty to one for media appearances. There are many television programs devoted to business, but not a one to workers or consumers.
rather they'll go find some fool wearing a bit too much camoflauge
Well, that is a rather accurate chariacature of the NRA. Rather than talking about gun education and the responsiblities of gun ownership, all of their political efforts focus on fighting off all forms of gun control. They talk about firearms as if they were magical firearms, guranteed to keep away robbers and evil governments. Speaking of evil governments, they complained about that a great deal during the Clinton years, going so far as to call federal agents "jack-booted government thugs". They've been oddly quiet during all of Bush's shenanigans, however. There's that hypocracy thing again.
They covered, but they went with the Dem party spin for the most part,
That wasn't "spin", that was reality. Republicans in Congress were going to investigate Clinton until they found something...you'd think for a judge with unlimited time and resources they could have come up with something better than his sex life. Oh, and he didn't lie at the trail, either.
They will attack a conservative with far less info, far less reliable info, etc.
Complete horseshit. If that were remotely the case, we'd be in the middle of Al Gore's second term right now. As it is, the media is either wildy conservative, or so cowed by accusations of "liberal bias" that they go out of their way to be easy on Republicans.
While some food items where scarce, it was not a market scarcity, but one caused by massive government interference.
Red herring. It was still scarce and was still rationed, and this "massive government interference" you talk of was making sure our troops had enough food.
And what is everyone's solution to this? Getting a different third party to pay the bill!
Don't be obtuse. That's what we have right now, and it's what I just talked about. With socialized medicine, it would be paid for by taxes, and as everyone pays taxes, everyone would be paying for it.
Currently the US healthcare system is NOT a market based system. The situation is far more complex than people make it out to be. It has some appearance of a market system, but there is so much government interference that it's horribly skewed.
Which is a good thing. You want to take your dad to the hospital for heart surgery and find out that the surgeon and lead nurse have two year degrees from the local tech school? Medical malpractice lawsuits would actually be the nightmare the GOP pretends it is. And without FDA mandated testing, we'd have a Vioxx every day of the week. Government regulation makes health care safer and cheaper for both patients and the industry. A "free medical market" might save you money in the short run, but the high cost of poor care would more than wipe out any "savings" you had.
The high cost of health care is due to the cartelization and licensing of doctors and medicine, as well as government regulations.
Insurance companies have more to do with the high cost of care. Having a system that based around having someone else pay the bill is a great way to waste money. Insurance companies are in business to collect premiums and deny claims.
If centralized, "socialized" distribution of necessary goods by the government is so great, then why aren't we doing it for food? Isn't food more important than healthcare?
Food is abundant and cheap. Healthcare is not. And when the supply was scarce, food was rationed...remember WWII?
And aside from the fairness aspect, the U.S. healthcare system is a failure because the whole thing is set up around getting someone else to pay the bill. We pay insurance companies to cover the cost of large medical expenses, and the insurance companies look for every possible way to deny that coverage. IIRC 15% of America's healthcare expense goes straight into administrative costs; Canadas is more like 2-3%.
Google is dominant because they've put out the best product. If they start abusing their position, they wont have the best product anymore, and users and advertizers will flock to Yahoo and Microsoft. Monopolies aren't just monopolies because of marketshare (see parent's example of Standard Oil) but because consumers don't have any choice but to use them.
What I'd like to see are solar panels on hybrids. Why not have the sun charge your batteries in addition to the gas motor? Supposedly the manufacturing process for current solar panels is pretty toxic, but that could be improved.
I don't get why consersatives who don't trust the gov't to guide the economy *do* trust it to manage private info well. If they F-up the economy, aren't they likely to F-up security as well? Somebody please explain this logic to me.
Because it's Bush doing it and not Clinton. There's a large number of Republicans who will defend Bush to the grave no matter what he does, whereas if Clinton had done the exact same thing with the exact same justifications, he would have been lynched by now by those same people.
Yet when MS, Oracle or Cisco ask that security researchers hold back found flaws until they can fix them Slashdot gets all up in arms about them trying to stifle researchers.
That's because in Microsoft's case at least, they are habitually lazy about releasing security flaws, despite the craptacular security record of their products. Sometimes they wont pay any attention to flaws until they start crashing networks all over the world.
Contrast that to Apple's record...zero viruses, zero worms, and no exploits that have led to widespread compromises in OS X systems. And Apple has been timely enough in their security patching that I'm confidant that the unfixed problems, if they actually are serious, will be fixed with the next update in the next month or so.
I guess Apple is still small enough that they can do no wrong.
I love it when these dicussions pop up, because there's always some asshats who think they are so clever for pointing out "Slashdot groupthink", when they are actually the pot calling the kettle black.
Sony will have an easy time selling all their PS3's when the supply is low, but that doesn't do squat in terms of gaining marketshare or competing with Microsoft and Nintendo.
JW's have some pretty fucked up ideas. I know a girl who's parents were Witnesses, and they forced her to get an operation on her jaw before she was 18. The operation wasn't needed to stop any pain or keep her from being disfigured, but if something went wrong during the operation, and she needed a blood transfusion to keep her alive, they would have refused to allow it.
or the fact that he's more wooden than Keanu Reaves
I think a large part of that had to do with Kerry listening to his campaign consultants; Gore was the same way. The way these consultants keep running races based on the wildly successful Dukakis campaign is infuriating, and it looks like the Dems are planning on coasting to victories this year rather than winning them. Any consultant who doesn't spend every waking second thinking about how to challenge the GOP should be fired.
Your argument here is that, since there are more sexual abuse cases arising from known acquaintances of the victim, that we should ignore the relatively minor threat of myspace. Unfortunatley, this argument is fallacious.
No, it's called "prioritizing". It doesn't make any sense to spend equal amounts of effort fighting threat A and threat B when A is far, far larger than B. Perfect example: alcohol and cigarrettes, which kill hundreds of thousands of people, vs marijuana, which doesn't kill anyone.
That's very true - and their second biggest battle is concealing their own misdeeds. In third place is preserving the union itself. In fourth place is the actual interests of their members.
Thanks for confirming the parent's point on corporate FUD.
Actually, the parent poster was incorrect. Fighting coroporate FUD is only half the battle. The rest of the anti-union argument is annecdotes...union Y did bad deed X, or union employee Y got away with stupid/lazy behavior N.
So why do people only bring up these arugments on the subject of unions, and not business? Anyone who has worked in the non-unionized private sector can come up with a list just as long, of employees who got away with stupid/lazy behavior N because they were good buddies with their supervisor, or an incompetent manager who just so happens to be a cousin of the CEO.
Some people are jerks, and some people are lazy. But for some reason they only count if they work in a union.
And from what I see on the news, businesses cheat on their taxes, cheat their shareholders, dump toxic waste in the river and sexually harrass their secretaries. So let's ban them, too.
Steel and textiles were mostly killed off by rising companies in foreign countries. Offshoring, on the otherhand, is killing jobs in the U.S. to export them to other countries, usually because of executive greed.
Slashdot Mirror
HOWEVER. The launch of the XBOX 360 cannot have faded much from our minds. Shortages. Outrageous prices on eBay. Microsoft taking a loss on the systems anyway. Even though I despise Sony, I have to concede that it would be awfully dumb of them to launch this system at a lower price. They're going to sell out. There's going to be a shortage for months. They might as well take as LITTLE loss as possible on these machines.
Of course Sony will sell out their initial stock, but if they are thinking this way, it will be another nail in their coffin. Why? Preorders. Rather than preorder a PS3 for $600 and wait till one comes in, gamers will just buy a 360 or preorder a Wii.
I wonder how far Sony is going to be laughing at everyone else?
Since the PS3/Blu Ray wont come remotely close to being a repeat of the PS2/DVD...nowhere.
The value of owning the dominant video standard cannot be overestimated.
But unless they drop the price AND all the bad PR they've gotten over the PS3's pricetag, that's not going to happen. The PS3 was supposed to be the trojan horse that got millions of Blu-Ray players into people's homes. Being able to get both a Wii and a 360 for the price of the high end PS3, consumers will hold off on high def video. Which means that HD-DVD will come in with it's lower cost and take over the market.
You might have a point if the PS3 was the only next gen console out there. Unfortunatly for Sony (and your point) is the fact that you'll be able to buy an Xbox 360 AND a Revolution (I refuse to use the new, stupid name) for the price of the "premium" PS3. Yes, Americans like charging too much money on their credit cards, but they also like "getting a good deal" even if it puts them farther in debt. With out a serious price reduction or a buttload of must-have games, Sony is dead in the water.
Try on Teddy Roosevelt
Yup. Bit of a racist dick, but ya gotta love the trust-busting.
Dwight Eisenhower
Yup. But next to today's GOP, he'd almost be a communist by now.
Ronald Reagan
No thanks. He had bucketloads of charisma, but not much else. Inventing the multi-trillion dollar defecit and helping to get the God-gun nut-free market jihad rolling weren't his most notable achievements. I would take Reagan on his worst day over Bush on his best day in a heartbeat, however.
When was the last time that the board of directors of Time Warner, General Electric, etc. were writing the on-air scripts and editing film clips and audio?
Straw man. Ever hear of delegation?
The people who do those tasks overwhelmingly identify themselves are liberals
Conservative urban legend. "Studies" that demonstrate this are notoriously flawed.
They'll interview a lawyer/PR spokesperson from the pro-gun control or pro-choice side but not interview a lawyer/PR spokesperson for the other sides,
When. And being pro-choice should be a conservative position as well as a liberal one, as one of the long standing positions of conservatives and the GOP is that the government should stay out of people's private lives. But of course the GOP is now built on top of the God-gun nut-free market jihad, so you'll see this kind of double standards and hypocracy all the time.
And besides if you want to talk about how media covers stories, remmber that the media was overwhelmingly pro-NAFTA and pro globalization, as well as pro-deregulation and pro-big business. CEO's and other businesspoeple outnumber workers interests, such as unions, by thirty to one for media appearances. There are many television programs devoted to business, but not a one to workers or consumers.
rather they'll go find some fool wearing a bit too much camoflauge
Well, that is a rather accurate chariacature of the NRA. Rather than talking about gun education and the responsiblities of gun ownership, all of their political efforts focus on fighting off all forms of gun control. They talk about firearms as if they were magical firearms, guranteed to keep away robbers and evil governments. Speaking of evil governments, they complained about that a great deal during the Clinton years, going so far as to call federal agents "jack-booted government thugs". They've been oddly quiet during all of Bush's shenanigans, however. There's that hypocracy thing again.
They covered, but they went with the Dem party spin for the most part,
That wasn't "spin", that was reality. Republicans in Congress were going to investigate Clinton until they found something...you'd think for a judge with unlimited time and resources they could have come up with something better than his sex life. Oh, and he didn't lie at the trail, either.
They will attack a conservative with far less info, far less reliable info, etc.
Complete horseshit. If that were remotely the case, we'd be in the middle of Al Gore's second term right now. As it is, the media is either wildy conservative, or so cowed by accusations of "liberal bias" that they go out of their way to be easy on Republicans.
While some food items where scarce, it was not a market scarcity, but one caused by massive government interference.
Red herring. It was still scarce and was still rationed, and this "massive government interference" you talk of was making sure our troops had enough food.
And what is everyone's solution to this? Getting a different third party to pay the bill!
Don't be obtuse. That's what we have right now, and it's what I just talked about. With socialized medicine, it would be paid for by taxes, and as everyone pays taxes, everyone would be paying for it.
Currently the US healthcare system is NOT a market based system. The situation is far more complex than people make it out to be. It has some appearance of a market system, but there is so much government interference that it's horribly skewed.
Which is a good thing. You want to take your dad to the hospital for heart surgery and find out that the surgeon and lead nurse have two year degrees from the local tech school? Medical malpractice lawsuits would actually be the nightmare the GOP pretends it is. And without FDA mandated testing, we'd have a Vioxx every day of the week. Government regulation makes health care safer and cheaper for both patients and the industry. A "free medical market" might save you money in the short run, but the high cost of poor care would more than wipe out any "savings" you had.
The high cost of health care is due to the cartelization and licensing of doctors and medicine, as well as government regulations.
Insurance companies have more to do with the high cost of care. Having a system that based around having someone else pay the bill is a great way to waste money. Insurance companies are in business to collect premiums and deny claims.
If centralized, "socialized" distribution of necessary goods by the government is so great, then why aren't we doing it for food? Isn't food more important than healthcare?
Food is abundant and cheap. Healthcare is not. And when the supply was scarce, food was rationed...remember WWII?
And aside from the fairness aspect, the U.S. healthcare system is a failure because the whole thing is set up around getting someone else to pay the bill. We pay insurance companies to cover the cost of large medical expenses, and the insurance companies look for every possible way to deny that coverage. IIRC 15% of America's healthcare expense goes straight into administrative costs; Canadas is more like 2-3%.
Google is dominant because they've put out the best product. If they start abusing their position, they wont have the best product anymore, and users and advertizers will flock to Yahoo and Microsoft. Monopolies aren't just monopolies because of marketshare (see parent's example of Standard Oil) but because consumers don't have any choice but to use them.
Thus the question. Duh. And it's curious that someone modded me down as "offtopic" but not anyone else in the thread.
What I'd like to see are solar panels on hybrids. Why not have the sun charge your batteries in addition to the gas motor? Supposedly the manufacturing process for current solar panels is pretty toxic, but that could be improved.
I don't get why consersatives who don't trust the gov't to guide the economy *do* trust it to manage private info well. If they F-up the economy, aren't they likely to F-up security as well? Somebody please explain this logic to me.
Because it's Bush doing it and not Clinton. There's a large number of Republicans who will defend Bush to the grave no matter what he does, whereas if Clinton had done the exact same thing with the exact same justifications, he would have been lynched by now by those same people.
I'd look into it, no matter how oscure it is.
Typo, or attempted irony?
Yet when MS, Oracle or Cisco ask that security researchers hold back found flaws until they can fix them Slashdot gets all up in arms about them trying to stifle researchers.
That's because in Microsoft's case at least, they are habitually lazy about releasing security flaws, despite the craptacular security record of their products. Sometimes they wont pay any attention to flaws until they start crashing networks all over the world.
Contrast that to Apple's record...zero viruses, zero worms, and no exploits that have led to widespread compromises in OS X systems. And Apple has been timely enough in their security patching that I'm confidant that the unfixed problems, if they actually are serious, will be fixed with the next update in the next month or so.
I guess Apple is still small enough that they can do no wrong.
I love it when these dicussions pop up, because there's always some asshats who think they are so clever for pointing out "Slashdot groupthink", when they are actually the pot calling the kettle black.
Sony will have an easy time selling all their PS3's when the supply is low, but that doesn't do squat in terms of gaining marketshare or competing with Microsoft and Nintendo.
JW's have some pretty fucked up ideas. I know a girl who's parents were Witnesses, and they forced her to get an operation on her jaw before she was 18. The operation wasn't needed to stop any pain or keep her from being disfigured, but if something went wrong during the operation, and she needed a blood transfusion to keep her alive, they would have refused to allow it.
I don't think that's fair. Dvorak and Cringely have a business model that's based on coming up with crazy shit.
For Dvorak, absolutely. But for Cringely...huh? He pontificates over at PBS, where the only ad on his page is a banner ad at the top for PBS shows.
or the fact that he's more wooden than Keanu Reaves
I think a large part of that had to do with Kerry listening to his campaign consultants; Gore was the same way. The way these consultants keep running races based on the wildly successful Dukakis campaign is infuriating, and it looks like the Dems are planning on coasting to victories this year rather than winning them. Any consultant who doesn't spend every waking second thinking about how to challenge the GOP should be fired.
Your argument here is that, since there are more sexual abuse cases arising from known acquaintances of the victim, that we should ignore the relatively minor threat of myspace. Unfortunatley, this argument is fallacious.
No, it's called "prioritizing". It doesn't make any sense to spend equal amounts of effort fighting threat A and threat B when A is far, far larger than B. Perfect example: alcohol and cigarrettes, which kill hundreds of thousands of people, vs marijuana, which doesn't kill anyone.
That's very true - and their second biggest battle is concealing their own misdeeds. In third place is preserving the union itself. In fourth place is the actual interests of their members.
Thanks for confirming the parent's point on corporate FUD.
Actually, the parent poster was incorrect. Fighting coroporate FUD is only half the battle. The rest of the anti-union argument is annecdotes...union Y did bad deed X, or union employee Y got away with stupid/lazy behavior N.
So why do people only bring up these arugments on the subject of unions, and not business? Anyone who has worked in the non-unionized private sector can come up with a list just as long, of employees who got away with stupid/lazy behavior N because they were good buddies with their supervisor, or an incompetent manager who just so happens to be a cousin of the CEO.
Some people are jerks, and some people are lazy. But for some reason they only count if they work in a union.
And from what I see on the news, businesses cheat on their taxes, cheat their shareholders, dump toxic waste in the river and sexually harrass their secretaries. So let's ban them, too.
Steel and textiles were mostly killed off by rising companies in foreign countries. Offshoring, on the otherhand, is killing jobs in the U.S. to export them to other countries, usually because of executive greed.