Well, with most Libertarians being grumpy aging men, I'd say the time for a basic living wage is likely to become a reality.
Really?
I thought a bunch of them were 20-somethings who think they're smarter than everyone else. Plus some middle-aged ones who never outgrew that mentality and their love of Ayn Rand.
I'll go ahead and admit I followed this philosophy when I was around 18. Luckily, I got wiser and more mature as I aged.
Invalid argument. Gas stations are not a monopoly, nor is Windows. Windows is not comparable to all gas stations. Furthermore, plastering your windshield with ads is likely illegal because of safety reasons.
However, to run with your argument, if Exxon stations stuck advertising stickers in the corner of my windshield every time I got gas there, I'd stop going to Exxon stations, and would go to one of their competitors.
Similarly, if I don't like how Microsoft treats me, I would stop using Microsoft software, and use one of the alternatives.
Your claims that there's no viable alternative are false. Apple for one will happily agree with me there. Red Hat will too.
If you've locked yourself into some software that only runs on Windows, that was your own choice. I wouldn't buy a car audio system that only worked in Ford Pintos.
Has he? How are his actions actually affecting Microsoft's revenues? If screwing over customers creates more revenue, then he's doing the right thing. After all, we keep seeing with this stuff that customers simply are *not* willing to abandon the Windows platform, no matter how poorly they're treated.
I completely disagree. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Physical spouse abuse is illegal, and actionable. Microsoft treating customers poorly is not. There's a good reason we don't have excessive government interference about how companies treat customers; it's a waste of resources and would create stifling bureaucracy. Customers who don't like their vendors just need to find new vendors, not whine about it and ask for government help.
You don't *need* specialized Windows-only software. You don't even need to run a TV station. If you want such software, you can either put up with the choices offered, ask the software vendor to make a better version that doesn't use Windows, or make your own. Last I heard, local TV stations are all affiliated with nationwide networks, and I simply do not believe the a corporation as large as NBC or CBS doesn't have the resources to roll their own software or come up with some kind of workaround.
Trump is in fact backing Bernie saying that Bernie is being screwed out of winning the primaries by Hillary and the democrat party.
Trump was right on the money with that comment, however I wouldn't call it "backing Bernie": he could very well want to see Bernie run as an independent in order to "split the vote".
This is possible, however if Obama pardons her, that's going to (IMO) guarantee she'll lose the election.
Again IMO, it'd be a lot smarter for the Democratic Party to figure out how to get rid of Hillary and nominate Bernie, because he doesn't have all this baggage, and polls much better among general voters than Hillary does, and he'll also get the under-35 crowd to show up to vote for him (and other Dem seats). But with DWS and friends running the DNC, I don't see this happening. I think we can look forward to 8 years of Republicans controlling both Congress and the White House, and if that happens, we'll be lucky if Trump is the Pres since he's not very conservative like Cruz is.
It doesn't work that way. The problem is that the Presidential election is normally how Democrats get voters to come vote for Congresspeople; it's largely why they do so poorly in the mid-term elections.
Bernie is the one who's actually gotten the youth excited about voting; there's some strong parallels between his campaign and Obama's in 2008. Obama won largely because the Democrats got the young voters to turn out, after being inspired by his speeches. However, this didn't quite happen this time: they were inspired by Bernie (but this time there's actually substance because Bernie actually has a long track record in Congress supporting his rhetoric, unlike Obama; the youth learned this lesson), but apparently not enough to win the Primaries for various reasons (too many voters thinking Hillary is "entitled" to be President, dirty tricks by the DNC to help Hillary, blatant fraud in some of the primaries such as Illinois where hand recounts proved the machines lied).
What could quite possibly happen is that, with the DNC coronating Hillary and pushing Bernie aside, the young voters will be pissed off and disillusioned, and not bother voting. This means the Dems will lose Congressional seats too. The DNC has really shot itself in the foot here IMO. Only appealing to dried-up retirement-age feminists and conservative blacks and then adopting a condescending tone towards the 35-and-under crowd is not a recipe for success in the general election, unless they've engineered some fraudulent results with the voting machines in many places.
The Democratic Party's biggest problem is voter apathy. They try to pitch themselves as the party for left-leaning (and farther left) voters, minorities, working and lower classes, etc. But then when in office they just kowtow to their big corporate donors, mainly Wall Street and Hollywood, and then whine about how they can't get anything done even when they have control of Congress and the White House, and adopt very centrist and pro-corporate policies. This isn't inspiring to the people they claim to represent, and definitely isn't inspiring to young people who are more idealistic. Polls show that Hillary is downright despised by these young voters. So I really don't see this turning out well for the Dems.
But you're probably right about it being a false-flag operation: it was most likely staged by the Hillary campaign. After all, her campaign already pays shills to spew propaganda on social media sites. With Sanders obviously preparing to exit the race, Hillary is looking ahead to the general election where she'll most likely to fighting Trump, so she's doing her usual dirty tricks to try to make him look bad.
It could also have been done by the Cruz campaign. After all, they resorted to dirty tricks like this before when they falsely told people at caucuses that Carson had dropped out of the race.
But you *did* authorize it, by accepting automatic updates on your Windows computer and giving Microsoft permission to do those updates. You've placed your trust in MS that they wouldn't abuse this power, but they have. Now it's up to you to decide if you're going to continue to trust this vendor or not.
MS isn't some 3rd party, they're your OS vendor, who you've expressly chosen to be your vendor and to provide you software updates. They've done just that, you just don't like the update they've given you. I don't see how this is illegal, this is just a sour business relationship. There's only one solution to a sour business relationship, and that's to find a new vendor.
Either use an old version that doesn't run in Windows (apparently they used to run on SGI boxes), and/or demand that the weather program vendors make a version that doesn't use Windows. There's a lot more customers of these programs than suppliers; if the customers band together and make demands on the suppliers, the suppliers will be forced to act. If they don't, the customers should join forces and develop their own weather software collaboratively. It's not like these TV stations are competing with each other anyway, usually: TV stations are local/regional, and usually part of some national network. You don't think CBS, for instance, has the resources to hire a software team (or hire a vendor) to develop their own custom weather software?
I disagree. Call me a Microsoft apologist if you want: I happily defend their behavior here.
Companies have *every right* to treat their customers like total shit. Usually, this isn't very smart because such companies go out of business. Try running a restaurant where you berate your customers and provide them with horrible service and lousy food (but still not running afoul of food-safety laws) and see how long you stay in business. But if a restaurateur wants to do this, he has every right in my opinion, and according to the law too AFAICT.
Customers, by the same token, have *every right* to refuse to do business with shitty companies.
Now, if a company is not a monopoly (I don't think MS qualifies any more, what with Linux and Mac and Android/iOS tablets), it seems to me that it's the *user's* fault if he continues to patronize a company that abuses him. It may be inconvenient, but that's too bad: you don't have a right to convenience, or to having companies provide you the product/service you want and in the exact way that you want it. If you don't like the deal they're offering, and you don't like their after-the-sale customer service, then it's your responsibility to take your business elsewhere.
If customers refuse to do this, and insist on throwing their money at a company that treats them like shit, I'm sorry, but I can't blame the company for that. Blaming the company isn't going to change things after all. Blame them all you want: they'll just tell you, "yes, we accept your blame. Here's some more ads and some more shitty UIs, suckers!!! Hahahahaha!!! What are you going to do about it?"
Sitting around and whining about the bad behavior of someone who has no morals and no conscience and imploring them to "please be nice" is a waste of time and counterproductive. You can only change your own behavior, and if that means eliminating your dependence on that evil person, then that's what you need to do.
I'm going to have to defend Microsoft on this one.
Microsoft has *every right* to try to shove Win10 down everyone's throat, using the slimiest tactics they can come up with, and making life as miserable as they want for their customers.
Customers, accordingly, have every right to not use Microsoft software.
If customers willingly submit themselves for this abuse, how is it Microsoft's fault? Microsoft's behavior here is now well-known, so customers (esp. businesses) really don't have an excuse.
You call this a "stupid marketing fuckup", but is it really? Will this cause Microsoft's revenues to rise or fall? That's the only thing that matters. If it pisses off so many customers that they end up losing customers and losing revenue, then it is indeed a fuckup. But if it gains more advertising revenue from existing customers, and royally pisses off customers but those customers refuse to abandon their support for Microsoft, then it's not a fuckup at all, it's actually a smart move.
This may sound completely sociopathic, and it is: Microsoft, like any corporation, is an amoral entity, run by sociopaths. It's up to customers to recognize this and not reward this behavior. If the customers refuse to do this, and insist on supporting sociopathic and abusive (but completely legal) behavior, what can you do? As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.
Oh well, at least a couple of the Bill of Rights Amendments got skipped or have become irrelevant. No one is quartering troops in private homes these days, eh?
Actually, they are: there was a case a few years ago in Henderson, Nevada where a homeowner filed a lawsuit against the Henderson Police Department which included a 3rd-Amendment complaint. Apparently the police demanded to use his house as a temporary base for spying on one of his neighbors, and when he refused, they murdered his dog, beat him to a pulp, arrested him, and proceeded to use the house anyway, causing massive damage to it.
If someone who's more computer-savvy wanted to frame someone else who isn't, and they have access to the latter person's computer, they could download some CP, then encrypt the computer's drive, then call the po-po. Heck, they don't even need to download the CP, they just have to claim they saw it. Now, the victim can't decrypt the hard drive because he didn't encrypt it in the first place, so he'll claim he doesn't know the password (and he's telling the truth), while the court has "evidence" that there's contraband (the false testimony of the framer), and since the defendant is refusing to supply the password he doesn't know, he gets held in contempt and jailed indefinitely.
I'm not trying to be a Musk fanboy here, and I've looked up the Wiktionary definition of "innovator", but I wonder if the term isn't misused, or being defined incorrectly as compared to its actual popular usage. It seems to simply be a synonym for "inventor".
Obviously, Musk is not an inventor. He didn't invent any of the technologies he pushes.
However, he does popularize these technologies and help make them mature and sellable through both his financing and leadership. I don't know what the exact word is for that, but it's something. It's not that different from what Steve Jobs did; Apple didn't invent the smartphone (or the portable music player before that), but it certainly played a big role in making it as popular as it is now.
Just to add to this, the parent is partly right I think: their customers are moving on. Volvo no longer has a big lead on safety like they used to; cars overall are ridiculously safe these days, the governmental standards are very high (and rising), other carmakers push safety too and advertise their IIHS rankings, so you're probably not going to be any safer in a Volvo than in an Audi, for instance, or maybe even a mid-size Toyota.
Yeah, exactly. Volvo's core market has always been middle-aged soccer moms and older, people who valued safety above all else, especially people with children.
The hipsters go for cheaper and generally stupid vehicles like the Nissan Qube, vehicles with "edgy" (read: ugly and stupid) design that attempt to look highly functional but really aren't. Volvos aren't cheap cars by any means; they're not as expensive as Benzes and BMWs, but they're close, and probably on-par with Audis. You usually see lots of Volvos in areas that are very affluent and have upper-middle-class families with children. That's not the hipster market.
Musk says autopilot controlled vehicles have half the rate of crashes (where a crash is defined as an event that triggers the airbag) versus those under human control.
That sounds like a BS statistic. You wouldn't use Autopilot for all driving, only for certain highway driving. So a proper comparison would only be between Autopilot-driven miles versus human-driven miles in comparable conditions. And auto crashes on the highway are *already* much less frequent than on surface streets, for obvious reasons I hope.
So "half the rate of crashes" could actually be much worse than human piloting on the highway.
They don't need to fork a distro or create their own. There's already a bunch of distros already made by people like this, such as Devuan. All they have to do is go use one of those.
Yeah, and people used to drive around in cars with 40HP with no seat belts and hand-crank starters too. That doesn't mean anyone sane would want to go back to that.
I can't imagine what situations those would be. A 24" or 30" tablet would be completely infeasible to carry around. And using a screen less than 24" at a bare minimum for work like that makes no sense at all.
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Well, with most Libertarians being grumpy aging men, I'd say the time for a basic living wage is likely to become a reality.
Really?
I thought a bunch of them were 20-somethings who think they're smarter than everyone else. Plus some middle-aged ones who never outgrew that mentality and their love of Ayn Rand.
I'll go ahead and admit I followed this philosophy when I was around 18. Luckily, I got wiser and more mature as I aged.
Invalid argument. Gas stations are not a monopoly, nor is Windows. Windows is not comparable to all gas stations. Furthermore, plastering your windshield with ads is likely illegal because of safety reasons.
However, to run with your argument, if Exxon stations stuck advertising stickers in the corner of my windshield every time I got gas there, I'd stop going to Exxon stations, and would go to one of their competitors.
Similarly, if I don't like how Microsoft treats me, I would stop using Microsoft software, and use one of the alternatives.
Your claims that there's no viable alternative are false. Apple for one will happily agree with me there. Red Hat will too.
If you've locked yourself into some software that only runs on Windows, that was your own choice. I wouldn't buy a car audio system that only worked in Ford Pintos.
Has he? How are his actions actually affecting Microsoft's revenues? If screwing over customers creates more revenue, then he's doing the right thing. After all, we keep seeing with this stuff that customers simply are *not* willing to abandon the Windows platform, no matter how poorly they're treated.
I completely disagree. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Physical spouse abuse is illegal, and actionable. Microsoft treating customers poorly is not. There's a good reason we don't have excessive government interference about how companies treat customers; it's a waste of resources and would create stifling bureaucracy. Customers who don't like their vendors just need to find new vendors, not whine about it and ask for government help.
You don't *need* specialized Windows-only software. You don't even need to run a TV station. If you want such software, you can either put up with the choices offered, ask the software vendor to make a better version that doesn't use Windows, or make your own. Last I heard, local TV stations are all affiliated with nationwide networks, and I simply do not believe the a corporation as large as NBC or CBS doesn't have the resources to roll their own software or come up with some kind of workaround.
Trump is in fact backing Bernie saying that Bernie is being screwed out of winning the primaries by Hillary and the democrat party.
Trump was right on the money with that comment, however I wouldn't call it "backing Bernie": he could very well want to see Bernie run as an independent in order to "split the vote".
Exactly. This is a false-flag operation by either Hillary or Cruz or the GOP.
This is possible, however if Obama pardons her, that's going to (IMO) guarantee she'll lose the election.
Again IMO, it'd be a lot smarter for the Democratic Party to figure out how to get rid of Hillary and nominate Bernie, because he doesn't have all this baggage, and polls much better among general voters than Hillary does, and he'll also get the under-35 crowd to show up to vote for him (and other Dem seats). But with DWS and friends running the DNC, I don't see this happening. I think we can look forward to 8 years of Republicans controlling both Congress and the White House, and if that happens, we'll be lucky if Trump is the Pres since he's not very conservative like Cruz is.
It doesn't work that way. The problem is that the Presidential election is normally how Democrats get voters to come vote for Congresspeople; it's largely why they do so poorly in the mid-term elections.
Bernie is the one who's actually gotten the youth excited about voting; there's some strong parallels between his campaign and Obama's in 2008. Obama won largely because the Democrats got the young voters to turn out, after being inspired by his speeches. However, this didn't quite happen this time: they were inspired by Bernie (but this time there's actually substance because Bernie actually has a long track record in Congress supporting his rhetoric, unlike Obama; the youth learned this lesson), but apparently not enough to win the Primaries for various reasons (too many voters thinking Hillary is "entitled" to be President, dirty tricks by the DNC to help Hillary, blatant fraud in some of the primaries such as Illinois where hand recounts proved the machines lied).
What could quite possibly happen is that, with the DNC coronating Hillary and pushing Bernie aside, the young voters will be pissed off and disillusioned, and not bother voting. This means the Dems will lose Congressional seats too. The DNC has really shot itself in the foot here IMO. Only appealing to dried-up retirement-age feminists and conservative blacks and then adopting a condescending tone towards the 35-and-under crowd is not a recipe for success in the general election, unless they've engineered some fraudulent results with the voting machines in many places.
The Democratic Party's biggest problem is voter apathy. They try to pitch themselves as the party for left-leaning (and farther left) voters, minorities, working and lower classes, etc. But then when in office they just kowtow to their big corporate donors, mainly Wall Street and Hollywood, and then whine about how they can't get anything done even when they have control of Congress and the White House, and adopt very centrist and pro-corporate policies. This isn't inspiring to the people they claim to represent, and definitely isn't inspiring to young people who are more idealistic. Polls show that Hillary is downright despised by these young voters. So I really don't see this turning out well for the Dems.
Bullshit.
But you're probably right about it being a false-flag operation: it was most likely staged by the Hillary campaign. After all, her campaign already pays shills to spew propaganda on social media sites. With Sanders obviously preparing to exit the race, Hillary is looking ahead to the general election where she'll most likely to fighting Trump, so she's doing her usual dirty tricks to try to make him look bad.
It could also have been done by the Cruz campaign. After all, they resorted to dirty tricks like this before when they falsely told people at caucuses that Carson had dropped out of the race.
But you *did* authorize it, by accepting automatic updates on your Windows computer and giving Microsoft permission to do those updates. You've placed your trust in MS that they wouldn't abuse this power, but they have. Now it's up to you to decide if you're going to continue to trust this vendor or not.
MS isn't some 3rd party, they're your OS vendor, who you've expressly chosen to be your vendor and to provide you software updates. They've done just that, you just don't like the update they've given you. I don't see how this is illegal, this is just a sour business relationship. There's only one solution to a sour business relationship, and that's to find a new vendor.
Either use an old version that doesn't run in Windows (apparently they used to run on SGI boxes), and/or demand that the weather program vendors make a version that doesn't use Windows. There's a lot more customers of these programs than suppliers; if the customers band together and make demands on the suppliers, the suppliers will be forced to act. If they don't, the customers should join forces and develop their own weather software collaboratively. It's not like these TV stations are competing with each other anyway, usually: TV stations are local/regional, and usually part of some national network. You don't think CBS, for instance, has the resources to hire a software team (or hire a vendor) to develop their own custom weather software?
I disagree. Call me a Microsoft apologist if you want: I happily defend their behavior here.
Companies have *every right* to treat their customers like total shit. Usually, this isn't very smart because such companies go out of business. Try running a restaurant where you berate your customers and provide them with horrible service and lousy food (but still not running afoul of food-safety laws) and see how long you stay in business. But if a restaurateur wants to do this, he has every right in my opinion, and according to the law too AFAICT.
Customers, by the same token, have *every right* to refuse to do business with shitty companies.
Now, if a company is not a monopoly (I don't think MS qualifies any more, what with Linux and Mac and Android/iOS tablets), it seems to me that it's the *user's* fault if he continues to patronize a company that abuses him. It may be inconvenient, but that's too bad: you don't have a right to convenience, or to having companies provide you the product/service you want and in the exact way that you want it. If you don't like the deal they're offering, and you don't like their after-the-sale customer service, then it's your responsibility to take your business elsewhere.
If customers refuse to do this, and insist on throwing their money at a company that treats them like shit, I'm sorry, but I can't blame the company for that. Blaming the company isn't going to change things after all. Blame them all you want: they'll just tell you, "yes, we accept your blame. Here's some more ads and some more shitty UIs, suckers!!! Hahahahaha!!! What are you going to do about it?"
Sitting around and whining about the bad behavior of someone who has no morals and no conscience and imploring them to "please be nice" is a waste of time and counterproductive. You can only change your own behavior, and if that means eliminating your dependence on that evil person, then that's what you need to do.
I'm going to have to defend Microsoft on this one.
Microsoft has *every right* to try to shove Win10 down everyone's throat, using the slimiest tactics they can come up with, and making life as miserable as they want for their customers.
Customers, accordingly, have every right to not use Microsoft software.
If customers willingly submit themselves for this abuse, how is it Microsoft's fault? Microsoft's behavior here is now well-known, so customers (esp. businesses) really don't have an excuse.
You call this a "stupid marketing fuckup", but is it really? Will this cause Microsoft's revenues to rise or fall? That's the only thing that matters. If it pisses off so many customers that they end up losing customers and losing revenue, then it is indeed a fuckup. But if it gains more advertising revenue from existing customers, and royally pisses off customers but those customers refuse to abandon their support for Microsoft, then it's not a fuckup at all, it's actually a smart move.
This may sound completely sociopathic, and it is: Microsoft, like any corporation, is an amoral entity, run by sociopaths. It's up to customers to recognize this and not reward this behavior. If the customers refuse to do this, and insist on supporting sociopathic and abusive (but completely legal) behavior, what can you do? As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.
That reminds me of the adage about boiling a frog. Real frogs apparently aren't that stupid: they jump out when the water gets too warm.
Oh well, at least a couple of the Bill of Rights Amendments got skipped or have become irrelevant. No one is quartering troops in private homes these days, eh?
Actually, they are: there was a case a few years ago in Henderson, Nevada where a homeowner filed a lawsuit against the Henderson Police Department which included a 3rd-Amendment complaint. Apparently the police demanded to use his house as a temporary base for spying on one of his neighbors, and when he refused, they murdered his dog, beat him to a pulp, arrested him, and proceeded to use the house anyway, causing massive damage to it.
This is pretty scary actually.
If someone who's more computer-savvy wanted to frame someone else who isn't, and they have access to the latter person's computer, they could download some CP, then encrypt the computer's drive, then call the po-po. Heck, they don't even need to download the CP, they just have to claim they saw it. Now, the victim can't decrypt the hard drive because he didn't encrypt it in the first place, so he'll claim he doesn't know the password (and he's telling the truth), while the court has "evidence" that there's contraband (the false testimony of the framer), and since the defendant is refusing to supply the password he doesn't know, he gets held in contempt and jailed indefinitely.
I'm not trying to be a Musk fanboy here, and I've looked up the Wiktionary definition of "innovator", but I wonder if the term isn't misused, or being defined incorrectly as compared to its actual popular usage. It seems to simply be a synonym for "inventor".
Obviously, Musk is not an inventor. He didn't invent any of the technologies he pushes.
However, he does popularize these technologies and help make them mature and sellable through both his financing and leadership. I don't know what the exact word is for that, but it's something. It's not that different from what Steve Jobs did; Apple didn't invent the smartphone (or the portable music player before that), but it certainly played a big role in making it as popular as it is now.
Just to add to this, the parent is partly right I think: their customers are moving on. Volvo no longer has a big lead on safety like they used to; cars overall are ridiculously safe these days, the governmental standards are very high (and rising), other carmakers push safety too and advertise their IIHS rankings, so you're probably not going to be any safer in a Volvo than in an Audi, for instance, or maybe even a mid-size Toyota.
Yeah, exactly. Volvo's core market has always been middle-aged soccer moms and older, people who valued safety above all else, especially people with children.
The hipsters go for cheaper and generally stupid vehicles like the Nissan Qube, vehicles with "edgy" (read: ugly and stupid) design that attempt to look highly functional but really aren't. Volvos aren't cheap cars by any means; they're not as expensive as Benzes and BMWs, but they're close, and probably on-par with Audis. You usually see lots of Volvos in areas that are very affluent and have upper-middle-class families with children. That's not the hipster market.
Musk says autopilot controlled vehicles have half the rate of crashes (where a crash is defined as an event that triggers the airbag) versus those under human control.
That sounds like a BS statistic. You wouldn't use Autopilot for all driving, only for certain highway driving. So a proper comparison would only be between Autopilot-driven miles versus human-driven miles in comparable conditions. And auto crashes on the highway are *already* much less frequent than on surface streets, for obvious reasons I hope.
So "half the rate of crashes" could actually be much worse than human piloting on the highway.
If systemd really is as bad as some people say, why not fork a major distro and solve the problem?
They already have!!! It's called "Devuan" (a fork of Debian). And that's just one of many.
But apparently that's not good enough for them. The 17 people who use Devuan are still pissed that it isn't the most popular distro I guess.
They don't need to fork a distro or create their own. There's already a bunch of distros already made by people like this, such as Devuan. All they have to do is go use one of those.
Yeah, and people used to drive around in cars with 40HP with no seat belts and hand-crank starters too. That doesn't mean anyone sane would want to go back to that.
Wow, that's crappy. I was just looking at some M6500s on Ebay and saw they had x1200 screens. Oh well.
And computer makers are wondering why PC and laptop sales are in the toilet....
I can't imagine what situations those would be. A 24" or 30" tablet would be completely infeasible to carry around. And using a screen less than 24" at a bare minimum for work like that makes no sense at all.