But the best balance is about picking and choosing the best of all possible scenarios, not about dogmatic loyalties to particular arbitrary reference frames.
Capitalism works if there are resources to waste, that is if we can afford to have 20 different firms making a product, knowing that 80% of them will not exist in year, and half the inventory will be surplus.
In any system there are the vested interests that will oppress to maintain power or profits or whatever. And there are as many people in a America who do nothing but draw a paycheck as anywhere else.
Furthermore, capitalism depends upon us buying stuff. Therefore, we not only work to get money to buy stuff, we buy stuff so we can work. To me this leads to a flaw of capitalism, in that it requires a somewhat balanced distribution of wealth to function. If a few people have all the money, capitalism will not function as there is only so much stuff that one person can buy. To make sure that people really consume, you have to have a viable middle class, and even a viable lower class, for they are the ones that are going to be the largest consumers of basic goods. The yachts do not drive the economy, the food and clothes and rent does. To do this, as the natural tendency to collect wealth, a significant amount of socialism has to be introduced so that people will have enough confidence that new money will be coming in next week or next month and will therefore spend money instead of saving an undue amount. People who are worried about survival are not going to buy the goods that actually keep a firm afloat.
The interesting thing is that the number of hours work and productivity are not neccesarily related. I think in some companies at lot of hours are put in, but the results are not untilmately benificial. Enron was renowned in Houston for how hard working the employees were.
I think what we have brainwashed into believing those who work the most are the most dedicated, when in fact they may just be the least effecient, or, possible, the least qualified to do the job. Or pehaps the employer will not pay for the proper tools because he or she knows that the employee will donate the time neccesary to compensate for the substandard equipment. I am in a situation like that right now. Crappy cheap web designer are costing me a few hours a week of free time.
One last point. Healthcare and vacations should pay for themselves. A healthier worker will be more effectient. However, this only matters when the company is worried about the long term viability of the worker and has to pay for the long term care of the worker. Neither is that true in the current situation. The pay for unskilled labor is low enough so it does not matter if the worker is not effecient. Skilled labor is often on salary, so it often does not matter if all the labor is inexperienced and takes 25% more time. Health care is largely oursourced to the middle class, through taxes and insurance payments, so that is not a big issue either.
the belabored point from above is that Sweatshop America is realy TemporaryJobAmerica, in which companies hire on an as needed basis, works the employer as hard as possible, and then throws the employee away as soon as the job is done.
I have had to use IE more over the past several months because I have to use sites that have complicated and buggy IE only content. As long as these sites, which represent a great investment, have management and 'developers' that believe IE is the best and safest way to access the Web, as opposed to a convenient method of writing application front ends, IE will be be the predominant web browsers. It is simply not feasible to emulate the ever changing designed and accidental features of IE.
I would hope that large organizations would eventually realize that the money saved on the back end through the hiring of cheap developers and development tools is more than negated when considering that you are also paying for the virus detection systems, support staff, and system recovery of 10,000 users, but this has not happened. And as more money is poured down the drain of IE only sites, it is just going to get harder.
Phew, so the artists aren't really starving, but we still can't all go back to "borrowing" music from our friends instead of each purchasing our own copy.
When did we not borrow copies? Before P2P we made tapes. I suppose before recorded records we just stole the music and lyrics and sang it ourselves. To this day we burn CDs.
I don't think the issue is borrowing or copying or stealing. I think the issue is how much will it cost to do business in prerecorded media, and who will be willing to enter that business with those costs. Clearly small labels have always had a tough time. The big guys are and have been making money hand over fist for a very long time, at least the past 20 years.
Leakage or piracy or whatever is part of the cost. So is the drugs, prostitution, and violence. Some people are never going to buy a recording. Some always will. The goal should be to encourage the middle to buy without pissing them off and pushing them to the end that never buys. This is a worthwhile goal. P2P and ITMS is part of that goal. I know people that are buying music again because of these services.
Given current practices, "creative" means a web bug linked to 2o7. As much as I like apple, they seem way into the tracking of users as they move around the internet. I would think this would a prime opportunity for them to collect more marketing data.
Just because you are parniod does not mean people are not actully out to get you.
My take on this is a bit different. In the Christian area, even with all the anecdotal evidence to the contrary, we are always up in arms when a priest is questioned. Sure they are generally doing the right thing, but so is everyone else. It is only the exceptions that are doing really horrible stuff. Most of us are just trying to live our lives.
We see this in intelligence investigations. The non-white or non-Christian operative is questioned, while the white operatives are left free to sell out their fellow agents and the country. We have these extravagant cases against non-white people, or non-Christian religious figures, that often end up in shambles, but cannot seem to catch the white guy that has been putting the country at risk for a decade.
So, what the cop did either had merit or it did not. Just because the guy was a priest and not an imam or rabbi makes no difference. We know who blew up the building in Oklahoma, and who is going around the country killing doctors, and who are judging people saying they will burn forever just because these people disagree with the hypocrites personal belief systems.
iTunes probably will be bundled, and may even be the default, on HP computers. A lot of people, like entire school districts, buy these machines.
People will have to pay to use the MS service. The better analogy will be MSN, which, dispite great market advantage due to the desktop monopoly and advertising, only has a small part of the market. I mean even the free part, the search engine, does not have a majority of page hits, even though it is the default on IE.
The market is becoming more fragmented. People with iPods will continue to use iTunes and it will take something significant to get them to switch. Everyone else will switch music providers as is needed as there seems to be no brand loyalty other than Apple. Subscription services are the exception.
Only one or two cables are neccesary. A firewire and USb to the hub. The keyboard and mouse can be bluetooth. An airport express can take care of network, printing, and music.
Unless you need a phone line in, that is all.
that the same people who would never play a boom box in a public place, and would consider anyone who did ghetto, feel it is not only appropriate but necessary to randomly assault strangers with their vile taste in muzak.
The basics of manners are fundamental principles, not individual rules that must be torturously recompiled every time technology changes. I hear people complain all the time about the rap and hard rock and the like blaring from peoples cars and stereos. Well, if you want to help it stop, set an example. Don't subject the world to the din of Kenny G. Put your phone on the least offensive short ring, and when in a quiet place, put it on vibrate. You are more than welcome use the music when in the company of your gullible and easily impress technologically retarded friends. The rest of us know that is just a cry for attention. Get a life.
One useful thing is that the metadata can be more of less human readable, and a standard API can be used to insert, manage, and locate files based on the data. This is kind of useful because it frees the user from having to code the matadata into the filename, extension, or directory structure.
What this does not do is inherently make life simpler. For security and other reasons, files will still have to placed in proper directories.Whoever is saving the file will still have to remember to associate the metadata. Most people will find their labels are useless because they will not apply labels consistantly, or perhaps will misspell words. At the end of the day I will still get calls asking where certain files are.
What would be revolutionary, and more useful, is to use the data of the file to generate metadata. MS has some ability to do this, as we saw with clippy. 'It seems you are writing a letter to Alice about meeting her tonight for a quickie, and where you might do so away from your wife and friends. Would you like to file this under affairs:general, affairs:current, affairs:alice, and encrypt it with your personal password?"
The current icons in file cabinents system is not bad. it is just that people don't use it, or the OS won't let you use it effectively. The same will be true for meta-data.
The issue is this. The library has many functions. One of those functions is education. As an educational institution it has a duty to America to stock the broadest set of materials that will help Americans become educated, which means not only academics, but also culture and etceteras.
Study after study has shown a surefire predictor of all sorts of success is how much a child reads. Children who do not succeed as much, especially in school, tend not to read. So, one challenge is to get books that kids will read. This means that the level of the reading is age appropriate, and the content is compelling. Therefore, those who wish to ban for content, even if the books are widely read, are merely those people who are happy with America being a stupid country.
As a cultural depository, the issue is similar. Most may thing that magic is bad. Many will think that homosexuality is bad. Many will complain that tax money should not be spent on these things, but how about religious text? Are we to ban the bible because it promotes the prejudicial view that some are saved and some are not. Because of the depictions of mass murders. because of the depiction of the brutal slaying of an innocent man?
The real problem here is the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that allows children to watch a rated R movie that detail that violent and sadistic mutilation of man, but will freak when the same child sees a breast or a kiss. We must remember, it is the hypocrite, not the sinner, that is in the most trouble. Those that only give to impress others, those that pray in public, those that judge (an action reserved only for god), those that make pious ritual a public display of obligation and suffering.
Our children will learn about the world. It is best that we give them enough wisdom to make the best decisions about what information is the most useful, rather than impeding that wisdom by always making the decisions for them.
We have to remember that the media and the bits on the media are worthless. It is license that has value. In the old days, the product did have values, since we never talked about licensing music.
So what we need is more like a mortgage burning party in which we will burn all our licenses, thus showing our determination not to use windows. After all, none of us use windows without a license.
That was easy. For instance I just bought a gizmo that lets me share a monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is a solid state thing that operates via USB. The XP Pro HID drivers and EnergyStar drivers are so screwed up half the time the USB keyboard and mouse don't work. Or I might get random switches. On my Mac, it works perfectly.
I have said this many times. The Linux drivers seem to be superior to those avaiable for windows at an equal level of maturity. This was when we had to hack at the command line to get a mass storage device to work through the serial port. Or reboot to change a minor configuration.
Now some might argue that with advancement in technolgy Linux should be better. But remember that device manufacturer design to Windows, and incoporate hacks to compensate for Windows problems. Many of these might interfere with use in standards driven OS.
It is one thing not to have a girl because you just don't have time or unwilling to make the effort or spend the money, but another to waste time and money on something that isn't real.
I know that a guy who is bad with girls can use the simulation to practice, but really, just try a real girl. You don't have to date. Just hang. Also, this game is going to be used by guys with girls, but instead of talking and spending
time with thier girlfriends, they are going to be wasting time on this. A girlfriend is more than just a convinent hole and someone to make you dinner.
A long time ago, when I was taking sex ed, the book, Boys and Sex, talked about masturbation. It pretty much said all things in moderation, and solo activity should allow, not take the place of forming real relationships that are neccesary for emotional development. It sounds like this is just anothe thing that is going stunt the growth of a generation of teenage boys.
I believe some of this is due to the single user nature of MS Windows and older MacOS computers. The OS has no significant multiuser facilities, so a hack has to put into every program to emulate the functionality.
It was the same in the old days with printers. There was no abstraction layer for output devices, so it was neccesary for every application to supply it's own drivers.
On these and many issues MS Windows lags behind, and drags down all applications. There should be no reason for profiles in a browser. A user logs into the computer, and the runs whatever applications in a protected space, with all data stored in the user directory.
Administration is another issue. MS Windows has a lot of nifty tools that can be used by the semi skilled labor force, and therefore creates an advantage in the payroll aspect. Whether OSS can meet the challenge remains to be seen.
there is really no point. If you have an accident, and they show that you have manipulated the data, they keep your money and do not pay the claim. This would very simple to do if you have an accident in a location other than the one indicated by the GPS.
The real problem with this plan is that the current mandatory car insurance is there to make sure that if some causes an incident, there is money to pay for damages. Any complicated system that leads itself to abuse will just create more problems.
I don't think it is Best Buy or Circuit City, or whatever. I think it is people who buy stuff not understanding that the one who has the money is the one who should have the power. Instead, we tantilized by the gadgets and willing to sell our souls to get them.
A recent electronics purchase was attempted at both stores. Circuit City had the product, but it was locked up and no service person could be bothered to sell it. This was after being ignored for 10 minutes while he served other customers. Best Buy got the sale because a sales person was available, and, though the price was higher, it was matched. A consumer with no self respect would have waited endlessly for at Circuit City or paid the inflated price at Best Buy.
The extended service plans are often a waste of money. This was not always so. Ten or fifteen years ago they had value, and some still do. What I noticed at Best Buy is the plans do not cover LCD or batteries. The batteries are essentially a consumable. but the LCD is the only reason to get an extended warrenty. Todays laptops are very durble, and the thing that will fail is the LCD, or perhaps the HD.
At both stores the products are a vehicle to sell the service plan. Just accept this. If you do not like this, or the fact that every customer is assumed to be a criminal, shop somewhere else. If there is no where else, then don't buy anything. There is nothing there that you have to have. There is probably a city nearby with a good electronics store and sales staff that respect the fact you are spending you money.
The thing that pisses me off is the ritchous indignation that people feel when these stores do exactly what they are meant to do. It is like shopping at Wal Mart and then acting surprise when they break laws to keep prices low. No one can be that stupid. I have been tricked, but i didn't go crying that it was all someone elses fault. We have these problems because people want stuff more than people want respect.
But this is not stupidity. Most of it is honest interpretation, convention, or simple oppression. WRT the later, some American companies are going to prize profit above all and cave to the oppresing regime, but that is nothing to be proud of.
WRT the former issues, there are all sorts of things we do that is offensive. We put Australia on the bottom of the map. Why? We use a projection mechanism that distorts the sizes of geographic regions. Even the colors might be offensive to some one.
Stupid programming example are translating an english word into a profane word in the other language. Or catagorizing text by english usage rather than by funtion. What we have here are normal management decisions.
This may be funny but the reality is that Apple competes by giving a certain group of people really cool toys and another certain group of really cool toys and another group of people things that just work. Real, like so many others, are trying to compete solely on price, with a bit of OSS idolatry thrown in. The former is later irrelevent, and the later is too little.
It is just like giving people a really confortable pair of shoes or a perfect loaf of bread. Anything that threatens the product also threatens the user of the product. It is the nature the free market. Supply and demand, although foolish people ignore the demand part. When we get used to a semi-respectful company, we tend to demand that sort of service, and demand the annilation of anyone who want to stop the flow of our products.
Real has never in it's entire existance shown a customer centered product. No one who uses Quicktime or an iPod would ever want to have a Real product. Now, does that mean that Real has no right to exist or offer a product? Of course not. But they should have a product. A product that once was and still could acceptable. It would be better for them to improve that product.
I have owned and extensively used all these machines, in additon to thier succesors. The tandy 100 was a general purpose computer. It did not inherently have any organization software, and I do not remeber ever buying a tape with such software. I do not ever remember thinking that I would use the machine as a replacement for a day planner. In fact I had both.
The newton replaced my dayplanner, not my laptop. Apple did indeed commercialize the idea of a reletively advanced computer dedicated to storing and elegantly retrieving personal information. The only problem is that they visioned it as a standalone device, and did include sufficiently advanced provisions to connect with the GPC. And it was big. This is where Palm made advancement.
Pretty much everything else is targeted at the people who will only buy a commodity GPC. Perhaps striped down, but still a GPC.
Which might the best reason to not to run certain software or machines. When the BSA comes in an wants to use your employees and your machines to verify that you haven't stolen a single copy of MS software, just point out that all hardware is based on the PowerPC, and OO.org is the only suite allowed.
I know this is meant as a joke, but I feel pedantic.
The issue here is revenue not income. Four million in annual revenue for an established company is not a big desl. If we were talking about a sales company we might be looking at 100K income for the owner and half that much for a few sales people and an administrator.
I am sure that every principle at SCO pulls in more than 100K.
I think IBM or Novell probably did. But look at how hard it would be buy SCO.
At the time of the first suit, SCO was owned mostly insiders, and most of the rest was institutional. Stock price was hovering just above $2. If one could get stock holder to sell, perhaps at a small premium, anyone with 20 million could get majority stake.
But why would institutional holders, much less insiders, want to sell at 2 or 3 dollars, especially when they may have bought at 10 or even 20 times that amount? It would be better to hold onto the shares and see what happens. I mean if you already lost 95% of your investment, is the remaining 5% so much, especially when there is a chance that you might get more.
So anyone who would buy SCO would do so at a large premium. That amount of goodwill would probably kill any deal. It would no longer be a legal transaction, but extortion. One, at the time, would have had to deal with insiders, the same insiders that wanted to extort.
If it were possible to make the reasonable deal, there would be benifits. Although we all assume that the SCO case has no merit, IBM might have done some questionable things, as ever large company has done in the past. The purchase could clarify alot of ownership issues, at least in trademarks. None of this legal stuff is going to stop the IP violations suits.
I see your point, but I think you might be missing a basic property of good science fiction. Specifically good science fiction is going to explore how changing technology, and the mores resulting from the technology, will affect the fabric of society.
For example, a big difference between ST and the later series is that the later often rehashed original episodes without update, thereby exploring problems that were already fully considered if not solved. Even worse, some of the later shows did not even take this duty seriously, and merely put conventional stories in a futuristic set.
The big questions have to be explored. If sex is completely safe, even from pregnancy, will all our sex related taboos, even incest, disappear. One question, on whcih TNG did well with, was if we have Sentient Robots, will they live up to their namesake as slaves?
A result of this is that older SF will provide a view of the prevailing fears and bigotry. The later is shown with robots doing 'menial' duties such as cooking and cleaning, while the more 'advanced' duties, such as astronavigation we done by real men. The former, as shown in Galactica, was that we were afraid the Robots would take over our world. Something with has happened and we have not fully dealt with.
But that was back then. We have even greater worries now. As explored in Blade Runner and H2G2 (in the form of real people personalities, as well as B5 and every other SF show), we are afraid of non-humans that seem human. This is seen in the discomfort that we have with too realistic animation. This is also related to all forms of bigotry. It is harder, and less profitable, to discriminate when there is no clear physical basis on which to discriminate. This is why we like, as Homer says, our homosexuals flaming.
Which, to make a long story not so long, is why human looking robots are suitable to the modern BG. Machines making our lives miserable is old school. But as we, at least in America, find it necessary to comment on the black man that acts or looks too white, what would we do with a sentient human looking robot?
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism works if there are resources to waste, that is if we can afford to have 20 different firms making a product, knowing that 80% of them will not exist in year, and half the inventory will be surplus.
In any system there are the vested interests that will oppress to maintain power or profits or whatever. And there are as many people in a America who do nothing but draw a paycheck as anywhere else.
Furthermore, capitalism depends upon us buying stuff. Therefore, we not only work to get money to buy stuff, we buy stuff so we can work. To me this leads to a flaw of capitalism, in that it requires a somewhat balanced distribution of wealth to function. If a few people have all the money, capitalism will not function as there is only so much stuff that one person can buy. To make sure that people really consume, you have to have a viable middle class, and even a viable lower class, for they are the ones that are going to be the largest consumers of basic goods. The yachts do not drive the economy, the food and clothes and rent does. To do this, as the natural tendency to collect wealth, a significant amount of socialism has to be introduced so that people will have enough confidence that new money will be coming in next week or next month and will therefore spend money instead of saving an undue amount. People who are worried about survival are not going to buy the goods that actually keep a firm afloat.
I think what we have brainwashed into believing those who work the most are the most dedicated, when in fact they may just be the least effecient, or, possible, the least qualified to do the job. Or pehaps the employer will not pay for the proper tools because he or she knows that the employee will donate the time neccesary to compensate for the substandard equipment. I am in a situation like that right now. Crappy cheap web designer are costing me a few hours a week of free time.
One last point. Healthcare and vacations should pay for themselves. A healthier worker will be more effectient. However, this only matters when the company is worried about the long term viability of the worker and has to pay for the long term care of the worker. Neither is that true in the current situation. The pay for unskilled labor is low enough so it does not matter if the worker is not effecient. Skilled labor is often on salary, so it often does not matter if all the labor is inexperienced and takes 25% more time. Health care is largely oursourced to the middle class, through taxes and insurance payments, so that is not a big issue either.
the belabored point from above is that Sweatshop America is realy TemporaryJobAmerica, in which companies hire on an as needed basis, works the employer as hard as possible, and then throws the employee away as soon as the job is done.
I would hope that large organizations would eventually realize that the money saved on the back end through the hiring of cheap developers and development tools is more than negated when considering that you are also paying for the virus detection systems, support staff, and system recovery of 10,000 users, but this has not happened. And as more money is poured down the drain of IE only sites, it is just going to get harder.
When did we not borrow copies? Before P2P we made tapes. I suppose before recorded records we just stole the music and lyrics and sang it ourselves. To this day we burn CDs.
I don't think the issue is borrowing or copying or stealing. I think the issue is how much will it cost to do business in prerecorded media, and who will be willing to enter that business with those costs. Clearly small labels have always had a tough time. The big guys are and have been making money hand over fist for a very long time, at least the past 20 years.
Leakage or piracy or whatever is part of the cost. So is the drugs, prostitution, and violence. Some people are never going to buy a recording. Some always will. The goal should be to encourage the middle to buy without pissing them off and pushing them to the end that never buys. This is a worthwhile goal. P2P and ITMS is part of that goal. I know people that are buying music again because of these services.
Just because you are parniod does not mean people are not actully out to get you.
We see this in intelligence investigations. The non-white or non-Christian operative is questioned, while the white operatives are left free to sell out their fellow agents and the country. We have these extravagant cases against non-white people, or non-Christian religious figures, that often end up in shambles, but cannot seem to catch the white guy that has been putting the country at risk for a decade.
So, what the cop did either had merit or it did not. Just because the guy was a priest and not an imam or rabbi makes no difference. We know who blew up the building in Oklahoma, and who is going around the country killing doctors, and who are judging people saying they will burn forever just because these people disagree with the hypocrites personal belief systems.
People will have to pay to use the MS service. The better analogy will be MSN, which, dispite great market advantage due to the desktop monopoly and advertising, only has a small part of the market. I mean even the free part, the search engine, does not have a majority of page hits, even though it is the default on IE.
The market is becoming more fragmented. People with iPods will continue to use iTunes and it will take something significant to get them to switch. Everyone else will switch music providers as is needed as there seems to be no brand loyalty other than Apple. Subscription services are the exception.
Only one or two cables are neccesary. A firewire and USb to the hub. The keyboard and mouse can be bluetooth. An airport express can take care of network, printing, and music. Unless you need a phone line in, that is all.
The basics of manners are fundamental principles, not individual rules that must be torturously recompiled every time technology changes. I hear people complain all the time about the rap and hard rock and the like blaring from peoples cars and stereos. Well, if you want to help it stop, set an example. Don't subject the world to the din of Kenny G. Put your phone on the least offensive short ring, and when in a quiet place, put it on vibrate. You are more than welcome use the music when in the company of your gullible and easily impress technologically retarded friends. The rest of us know that is just a cry for attention. Get a life.
What this does not do is inherently make life simpler. For security and other reasons, files will still have to placed in proper directories.Whoever is saving the file will still have to remember to associate the metadata. Most people will find their labels are useless because they will not apply labels consistantly, or perhaps will misspell words. At the end of the day I will still get calls asking where certain files are.
What would be revolutionary, and more useful, is to use the data of the file to generate metadata. MS has some ability to do this, as we saw with clippy. 'It seems you are writing a letter to Alice about meeting her tonight for a quickie, and where you might do so away from your wife and friends. Would you like to file this under affairs:general, affairs:current, affairs:alice, and encrypt it with your personal password?"
The current icons in file cabinents system is not bad. it is just that people don't use it, or the OS won't let you use it effectively. The same will be true for meta-data.
Study after study has shown a surefire predictor of all sorts of success is how much a child reads. Children who do not succeed as much, especially in school, tend not to read. So, one challenge is to get books that kids will read. This means that the level of the reading is age appropriate, and the content is compelling. Therefore, those who wish to ban for content, even if the books are widely read, are merely those people who are happy with America being a stupid country.
As a cultural depository, the issue is similar. Most may thing that magic is bad. Many will think that homosexuality is bad. Many will complain that tax money should not be spent on these things, but how about religious text? Are we to ban the bible because it promotes the prejudicial view that some are saved and some are not. Because of the depictions of mass murders. because of the depiction of the brutal slaying of an innocent man?
The real problem here is the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that allows children to watch a rated R movie that detail that violent and sadistic mutilation of man, but will freak when the same child sees a breast or a kiss. We must remember, it is the hypocrite, not the sinner, that is in the most trouble. Those that only give to impress others, those that pray in public, those that judge (an action reserved only for god), those that make pious ritual a public display of obligation and suffering.
Our children will learn about the world. It is best that we give them enough wisdom to make the best decisions about what information is the most useful, rather than impeding that wisdom by always making the decisions for them.
So what we need is more like a mortgage burning party in which we will burn all our licenses, thus showing our determination not to use windows. After all, none of us use windows without a license.
This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
Vendor: *
That was easy. For instance I just bought a gizmo that lets me share a monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is a solid state thing that operates via USB. The XP Pro HID drivers and EnergyStar drivers are so screwed up half the time the USB keyboard and mouse don't work. Or I might get random switches. On my Mac, it works perfectly.
I have said this many times. The Linux drivers seem to be superior to those avaiable for windows at an equal level of maturity. This was when we had to hack at the command line to get a mass storage device to work through the serial port. Or reboot to change a minor configuration.
Now some might argue that with advancement in technolgy Linux should be better. But remember that device manufacturer design to Windows, and incoporate hacks to compensate for Windows problems. Many of these might interfere with use in standards driven OS.
I know that a guy who is bad with girls can use the simulation to practice, but really, just try a real girl. You don't have to date. Just hang. Also, this game is going to be used by guys with girls, but instead of talking and spending time with thier girlfriends, they are going to be wasting time on this. A girlfriend is more than just a convinent hole and someone to make you dinner.
A long time ago, when I was taking sex ed, the book, Boys and Sex, talked about masturbation. It pretty much said all things in moderation, and solo activity should allow, not take the place of forming real relationships that are neccesary for emotional development. It sounds like this is just anothe thing that is going stunt the growth of a generation of teenage boys.
It was the same in the old days with printers. There was no abstraction layer for output devices, so it was neccesary for every application to supply it's own drivers.
On these and many issues MS Windows lags behind, and drags down all applications. There should be no reason for profiles in a browser. A user logs into the computer, and the runs whatever applications in a protected space, with all data stored in the user directory.
Administration is another issue. MS Windows has a lot of nifty tools that can be used by the semi skilled labor force, and therefore creates an advantage in the payroll aspect. Whether OSS can meet the challenge remains to be seen.
The real problem with this plan is that the current mandatory car insurance is there to make sure that if some causes an incident, there is money to pay for damages. Any complicated system that leads itself to abuse will just create more problems.
A recent electronics purchase was attempted at both stores. Circuit City had the product, but it was locked up and no service person could be bothered to sell it. This was after being ignored for 10 minutes while he served other customers. Best Buy got the sale because a sales person was available, and, though the price was higher, it was matched. A consumer with no self respect would have waited endlessly for at Circuit City or paid the inflated price at Best Buy.
The extended service plans are often a waste of money. This was not always so. Ten or fifteen years ago they had value, and some still do. What I noticed at Best Buy is the plans do not cover LCD or batteries. The batteries are essentially a consumable. but the LCD is the only reason to get an extended warrenty. Todays laptops are very durble, and the thing that will fail is the LCD, or perhaps the HD.
At both stores the products are a vehicle to sell the service plan. Just accept this. If you do not like this, or the fact that every customer is assumed to be a criminal, shop somewhere else. If there is no where else, then don't buy anything. There is nothing there that you have to have. There is probably a city nearby with a good electronics store and sales staff that respect the fact you are spending you money.
The thing that pisses me off is the ritchous indignation that people feel when these stores do exactly what they are meant to do. It is like shopping at Wal Mart and then acting surprise when they break laws to keep prices low. No one can be that stupid. I have been tricked, but i didn't go crying that it was all someone elses fault. We have these problems because people want stuff more than people want respect.
WRT the former issues, there are all sorts of things we do that is offensive. We put Australia on the bottom of the map. Why? We use a projection mechanism that distorts the sizes of geographic regions. Even the colors might be offensive to some one.
Stupid programming example are translating an english word into a profane word in the other language. Or catagorizing text by english usage rather than by funtion. What we have here are normal management decisions.
It is just like giving people a really confortable pair of shoes or a perfect loaf of bread. Anything that threatens the product also threatens the user of the product. It is the nature the free market. Supply and demand, although foolish people ignore the demand part. When we get used to a semi-respectful company, we tend to demand that sort of service, and demand the annilation of anyone who want to stop the flow of our products.
Real has never in it's entire existance shown a customer centered product. No one who uses Quicktime or an iPod would ever want to have a Real product. Now, does that mean that Real has no right to exist or offer a product? Of course not. But they should have a product. A product that once was and still could acceptable. It would be better for them to improve that product.
The newton replaced my dayplanner, not my laptop. Apple did indeed commercialize the idea of a reletively advanced computer dedicated to storing and elegantly retrieving personal information. The only problem is that they visioned it as a standalone device, and did include sufficiently advanced provisions to connect with the GPC. And it was big. This is where Palm made advancement.
Pretty much everything else is targeted at the people who will only buy a commodity GPC. Perhaps striped down, but still a GPC.
Which might the best reason to not to run certain software or machines. When the BSA comes in an wants to use your employees and your machines to verify that you haven't stolen a single copy of MS software, just point out that all hardware is based on the PowerPC, and OO.org is the only suite allowed.
The issue here is revenue not income. Four million in annual revenue for an established company is not a big desl. If we were talking about a sales company we might be looking at 100K income for the owner and half that much for a few sales people and an administrator.
I am sure that every principle at SCO pulls in more than 100K.
At the time of the first suit, SCO was owned mostly insiders, and most of the rest was institutional. Stock price was hovering just above $2. If one could get stock holder to sell, perhaps at a small premium, anyone with 20 million could get majority stake.
But why would institutional holders, much less insiders, want to sell at 2 or 3 dollars, especially when they may have bought at 10 or even 20 times that amount? It would be better to hold onto the shares and see what happens. I mean if you already lost 95% of your investment, is the remaining 5% so much, especially when there is a chance that you might get more.
So anyone who would buy SCO would do so at a large premium. That amount of goodwill would probably kill any deal. It would no longer be a legal transaction, but extortion. One, at the time, would have had to deal with insiders, the same insiders that wanted to extort.
If it were possible to make the reasonable deal, there would be benifits. Although we all assume that the SCO case has no merit, IBM might have done some questionable things, as ever large company has done in the past. The purchase could clarify alot of ownership issues, at least in trademarks. None of this legal stuff is going to stop the IP violations suits.
For example, a big difference between ST and the later series is that the later often rehashed original episodes without update, thereby exploring problems that were already fully considered if not solved. Even worse, some of the later shows did not even take this duty seriously, and merely put conventional stories in a futuristic set.
The big questions have to be explored. If sex is completely safe, even from pregnancy, will all our sex related taboos, even incest, disappear. One question, on whcih TNG did well with, was if we have Sentient Robots, will they live up to their namesake as slaves?
A result of this is that older SF will provide a view of the prevailing fears and bigotry. The later is shown with robots doing 'menial' duties such as cooking and cleaning, while the more 'advanced' duties, such as astronavigation we done by real men. The former, as shown in Galactica, was that we were afraid the Robots would take over our world. Something with has happened and we have not fully dealt with.
But that was back then. We have even greater worries now. As explored in Blade Runner and H2G2 (in the form of real people personalities, as well as B5 and every other SF show), we are afraid of non-humans that seem human. This is seen in the discomfort that we have with too realistic animation. This is also related to all forms of bigotry. It is harder, and less profitable, to discriminate when there is no clear physical basis on which to discriminate. This is why we like, as Homer says, our homosexuals flaming.
Which, to make a long story not so long, is why human looking robots are suitable to the modern BG. Machines making our lives miserable is old school. But as we, at least in America, find it necessary to comment on the black man that acts or looks too white, what would we do with a sentient human looking robot?