The president thing is a bad analogy: we have crappy choices there because we have a rigged election system that mathematically prevents us from having any more choices. It's an unavoidable by-product of the first-past-the-post voting system: there can be only two. Other countries don't have that problem, because they have better voting systems.
There's no rigging going on with OSes. People are free to choose between Windows, Mac, and a ridiculous number of Linux variants (many of them being far easier to install and maintain than Windows), plus a few others. If they continue to choose Windows despite MS's abuse, then they deserve whatever they get.
How is free-market capitalism not working here? You seem to disagree with the choices of the majority, and you're telling them they're all wrong. If they like being spied on, who are you to tell them that's wrong?
Wrong. They licensed the OS. The customer does NOT own the OS. This has been made clear by licensing agreements and literally decades of precedent. If you don't trust the vendor you're licensing from, then why are you purchasing licensing from them?
If you don't like those things, you have choices. You can modify the source code to fit your needs and desires, or you can switch to an alternative. No one is forcing you to use Gnome; there's literally at least 6 mainstream alternatives available for it. No one's forcing you to use Firefox; lots of people use Chrome or Chromium. No one's forcing you to use systemd; several distros don't, or you can make your own distro if you have such a problem with it.
You have a choice with Windows too. If you don't like it, don't use it, and switch to an alternative. You won't get your money back, but that's what you get for making a stupid purchasing decision. But no one's forcing you to continue using it.
Wrong. If you're an IT employee, you're being paid to put up with whatever computing products your employer chooses to purchase. If you don't like it, go find another job. How your employer spends their money is no business of yours, as long as they continue to pay you the pay rate you both agreed to when you accepted the job.
If you're not personally paying for MS licenses, why do you care? It sounds like you're an employee: in that case, you're being paid to put up with MS's shenanigans. If you don't like it, go find another job. It's not like it's coming out of your bank account; you were hired to do a job, with the agreement that you'd be paid $X/pay period for that job. MS's business practices and licensing costs do not affect you in the least.
You can voice your discontent all you want, but if you continue patronizing that vendor, then you're just a fool. The vendor *does* own the OS on your machine; that's the whole nature of software licensing. If you don't trust your vendor, then don't purchase licensing from them. This was made abundantly clear in the EULA you agreed to, and had every opportunity to back out of.
Right, and that's why so many people abandoned Ubuntu when that happened, and migrated to other distros.
Not a problem.
But in Windows-land, people just sit around and bitch and complain, while continuing to send their money to Microsoft. (And don't forget, how much money did the Ubuntu users actually pay for using Ubuntu? Probably zero.)
Random feminists do not have access to your birth records. So in the future when anyone can get a CRISPR (or whatever) genetic treatment and suddenly look like a 25-year-old male or female of their choice, this stuff will largely be irrelevant. If there's hordes of stunningly gorgeous, 25-year-old women working in tech jobs, no one will be able to figure out, without some serious digging, if they were actually born female 25 years ago, or if they're actually 75-year-olds who used to be beer-bellied, balding men.
According to you. If you don't like it, don't buy from that business. If you do buy from that business, you're just an enabler.
Because it is unethical?
According to you. And so what? Why does this matter?
Because it is a poor business decision?
Wrong. It's a good business decision. Do you see Microsoft's profits disappearing? I don't. People keep buying from them. So their strategy seems to be working, therefore it's a good thing for them to do.
What part of "Fuck off and die" does Microsoft not understand?
What part of "we control the source code and can make it do whatever we want" do you not understand? Unless you've disconnected your Windows PC from the internet altogether, or taken some radical steps in altering the OS, it can do whatever it wants, including updating to a new version that includes spyware. The only easy way to avoid that is to simply stop using this OS or any other software from this vendor.
Glad my Linux machine doesn't try to automatically upgrade me to the next distro version.
Right, that's because those vendors actually respect their users. If most users weren't such morons, they would only use products from vendors who respect them and treat them fairly. But instead, they keep running back to the vendor that abuses them. Sorry, but I just don't have any sympathy for people who willingly accept abuse.
The only hope the Mid-East crazies have of living with each other is democracy.
Oh please, this is just dumb. Democracy is proven not to work in the middle east. They tried it in Egypt and elected the Muslim Brotherhood. Democracy doesn't work when you have a bunch of different factions constantly fighting each other. A strong leader like Assad or Saddam Hussein is what you need in those countries, to keep the peace and keep everyone in line, using brutal methods if necessary. Democracy only works in developed nations where people are educated and the culture is fairly homogeneous, so that politics is only arguing about exactly how much funding different programs should get, rather than arguing about which religion should be the state-supported one.
I don't get your point here. Are you saying they should or shouldn't be given preferential treatment the way blacks and Hispanics are?
I'm pointing out that they're *not*, and that this is inconsistent with how other minorities are treated. As you point out, in the past, they *were* treated very poorly (if you lump all "Asians" into a single category), but today they're not given any kind of special treatment at all, whereas blacks and Hispanics are.
Most "christian extremists" do things like build churches in third world countries and/or pray in front of abortion clinics.
No, they do more than that. They go to 3rd-world countries in Africa and build churches and then teach people how "evil" gay people are, and encourage them to pass laws legalizing the murder of gay people.
We need to figure out what makes a person cross over where they are willing to blow up a whaling ship, attempt to assassinate the president, etc...
I don't think it's that simple. For instance, it actually makes logical sense to blow up a whaling ship if you want to stop whaling. It's pretty hard to kill whales without a proper whaling ship after all. And if you blow up such a ship, it'll make potential crewmembers think twice about joining another whaling crew. It's not like there's lots and lots of whaling ships and whalers out there: it's a really small population. It's kinda like killing poachers: there just aren't very many of them, so extermination is a viable solution, though obviously grim. That's why countries trying to protect their endangered animals have adopted the extermination route.
Assassinating the President is actually a pretty stupid thing to do if you think about it. It's not like the country is going to change course 180 degrees if you do that, plus you can kiss your life goodbye (either shot, or jailed forever). It's really more of a symbolic act than anything, a way of getting attention, or a product of mental disorder. Look at the last assassination attempt (Reagan): the assassin was a lunatic. JFK's killer (putting aside any conspiracy theories for the moment) was mentally unbalanced. (Or, maybe he was set up by someone else, who took advantage of his mental state.) Lincoln's killer was also mentally unbalanced, and pissed about the Civil War.
Similarly, terrorist acts really don't make that much sense if you're trying to accomplish real change. Killing a few dozen people isn't going to affect population numbers in any significant way, and as we've seen, it doesn't affect policy much, in fact it usually makes it much worse for whatever group sponsored the terrorists by creating blowback: the attacked nation unleashes their military and bombs the shit out of wherever the terrorists came from. I guess you could argue it helps their cause by killing their own people, driving more of them to joining the terrorists, but that seems rather short-sighted, though that is a common human failing. But unlike sinking whaling ships, it's not going to fix your problem quickly.
Simply put: if you sank a small handful of whaling ships tomorrow, whaling would end for a while (they'd need to build or outfit some new ones), and quite possibly for good if it puts the whalers out of business which it very well could. But killing the president or murdering a few dozen people in a terrorist action is not going to, for instance, cause western nations to suddenly pull out of the Middle East or convert to Islam. So I don't think the mentality is quite the same. The first, while exceeding most people's boundaries of appropriate action, makes some logical sense, if in a brutal fashion. The second, does not.
Well for the people who care about this, they only see people as a "minority" if they're a racial minority that generally doesn't do well economically in the US. So Jewish people (which isn't really a race, there are many different ethnicities of Jews) and Asians don't count. The full term is "disadvantaged minorities". Somehow Asians don't get this status because, while they're certainly a minority, they actually do really well scholastically and economically, usually a lot better than Caucasians on average.
Growing new ones sounds unworkable. I skimmed the article and couldn't find any mention about how long they think it would take, but think about it: how long did it take you to grow those teeth in the first place? Quite a while; that's why we have "baby teeth", while the new ones are growing into place.
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't want to wait a year for a replacement tooth to grow into place. Current methods don't have this problem: you can be in and out of the dentist's office in a few hours at most and be ready to use your new tooth/teeth.
Also, real teeth actually suck. They're too easy to damage, they rot easily, they're just not very durable. They also stain easily and require regular whitening treatments. It'd be better if we just had them all replaced with fake ones. The only reason we don't do this is because it's too expensive, so only rich Hollywood actors bother with it.
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But you can not get the money back when the MS ruins a OS version user has bought and has been using for years.
Yep, that's the problem with purchasing software licenses. Caveat emptor.
Of course a sane user will not buy anything new from a vendor which treats its customers as MS nowadays does.
Exactly, this is my whole point!!
The president thing is a bad analogy: we have crappy choices there because we have a rigged election system that mathematically prevents us from having any more choices. It's an unavoidable by-product of the first-past-the-post voting system: there can be only two. Other countries don't have that problem, because they have better voting systems.
There's no rigging going on with OSes. People are free to choose between Windows, Mac, and a ridiculous number of Linux variants (many of them being far easier to install and maintain than Windows), plus a few others. If they continue to choose Windows despite MS's abuse, then they deserve whatever they get.
How is free-market capitalism not working here? You seem to disagree with the choices of the majority, and you're telling them they're all wrong. If they like being spied on, who are you to tell them that's wrong?
The customer bought the computer and the OS.
Wrong. They licensed the OS. The customer does NOT own the OS. This has been made clear by licensing agreements and literally decades of precedent. If you don't trust the vendor you're licensing from, then why are you purchasing licensing from them?
If you don't like those things, you have choices. You can modify the source code to fit your needs and desires, or you can switch to an alternative. No one is forcing you to use Gnome; there's literally at least 6 mainstream alternatives available for it. No one's forcing you to use Firefox; lots of people use Chrome or Chromium. No one's forcing you to use systemd; several distros don't, or you can make your own distro if you have such a problem with it.
You have a choice with Windows too. If you don't like it, don't use it, and switch to an alternative. You won't get your money back, but that's what you get for making a stupid purchasing decision. But no one's forcing you to continue using it.
Wrong. If you're an IT employee, you're being paid to put up with whatever computing products your employer chooses to purchase. If you don't like it, go find another job. How your employer spends their money is no business of yours, as long as they continue to pay you the pay rate you both agreed to when you accepted the job.
And when they do, users change distros to ones that align better with their beliefs and opinions.
If you're not personally paying for MS licenses, why do you care? It sounds like you're an employee: in that case, you're being paid to put up with MS's shenanigans. If you don't like it, go find another job. It's not like it's coming out of your bank account; you were hired to do a job, with the agreement that you'd be paid $X/pay period for that job. MS's business practices and licensing costs do not affect you in the least.
You can voice your discontent all you want, but if you continue patronizing that vendor, then you're just a fool. The vendor *does* own the OS on your machine; that's the whole nature of software licensing. If you don't trust your vendor, then don't purchase licensing from them. This was made abundantly clear in the EULA you agreed to, and had every opportunity to back out of.
Right, and that's why so many people abandoned Ubuntu when that happened, and migrated to other distros.
Not a problem.
But in Windows-land, people just sit around and bitch and complain, while continuing to send their money to Microsoft. (And don't forget, how much money did the Ubuntu users actually pay for using Ubuntu? Probably zero.)
This post of yours is extremely offensive to the undead.
Random feminists do not have access to your birth records. So in the future when anyone can get a CRISPR (or whatever) genetic treatment and suddenly look like a 25-year-old male or female of their choice, this stuff will largely be irrelevant. If there's hordes of stunningly gorgeous, 25-year-old women working in tech jobs, no one will be able to figure out, without some serious digging, if they were actually born female 25 years ago, or if they're actually 75-year-olds who used to be beer-bellied, balding men.
Because it is wrong?
According to you. If you don't like it, don't buy from that business. If you do buy from that business, you're just an enabler.
Because it is unethical?
According to you. And so what? Why does this matter?
Because it is a poor business decision?
Wrong. It's a good business decision. Do you see Microsoft's profits disappearing? I don't. People keep buying from them. So their strategy seems to be working, therefore it's a good thing for them to do.
What part of "Fuck off and die" does Microsoft not understand?
What part of "we control the source code and can make it do whatever we want" do you not understand? Unless you've disconnected your Windows PC from the internet altogether, or taken some radical steps in altering the OS, it can do whatever it wants, including updating to a new version that includes spyware. The only easy way to avoid that is to simply stop using this OS or any other software from this vendor.
Glad my Linux machine doesn't try to automatically upgrade me to the next distro version.
Right, that's because those vendors actually respect their users. If most users weren't such morons, they would only use products from vendors who respect them and treat them fairly. But instead, they keep running back to the vendor that abuses them. Sorry, but I just don't have any sympathy for people who willingly accept abuse.
You still have a choice: you can leave this vendor and pick another vendor that doesn't treat you this way.
If you refuse to do that, however, then you deserve whatever treatment this vendor feels like giving you.
I for one see nothing wrong with it either. If the user happily bends over and asks to be screwed, over and over, why shouldn't a business do so?
No one is forcing anyone to use Windows. If you don't like these policies, stop using it.
I can't change the gender I was assigned at birth. That's a matter of public records.
No, but in a decade or three, you may very well be able to change your sex at the genetic level, as well as reset your age.
The only hope the Mid-East crazies have of living with each other is democracy.
Oh please, this is just dumb. Democracy is proven not to work in the middle east. They tried it in Egypt and elected the Muslim Brotherhood. Democracy doesn't work when you have a bunch of different factions constantly fighting each other. A strong leader like Assad or Saddam Hussein is what you need in those countries, to keep the peace and keep everyone in line, using brutal methods if necessary. Democracy only works in developed nations where people are educated and the culture is fairly homogeneous, so that politics is only arguing about exactly how much funding different programs should get, rather than arguing about which religion should be the state-supported one.
I don't get your point here. Are you saying they should or shouldn't be given preferential treatment the way blacks and Hispanics are?
I'm pointing out that they're *not*, and that this is inconsistent with how other minorities are treated. As you point out, in the past, they *were* treated very poorly (if you lump all "Asians" into a single category), but today they're not given any kind of special treatment at all, whereas blacks and Hispanics are.
what's 'moronic' about being on the left, and not liking Sanders because he is male?
Um, because that makes you a sexist?
Wow.
Most "christian extremists" do things like build churches in third world countries and/or pray in front of abortion clinics.
No, they do more than that. They go to 3rd-world countries in Africa and build churches and then teach people how "evil" gay people are, and encourage them to pass laws legalizing the murder of gay people.
We need to figure out what makes a person cross over where they are willing to blow up a whaling ship, attempt to assassinate the president, etc...
I don't think it's that simple. For instance, it actually makes logical sense to blow up a whaling ship if you want to stop whaling. It's pretty hard to kill whales without a proper whaling ship after all. And if you blow up such a ship, it'll make potential crewmembers think twice about joining another whaling crew. It's not like there's lots and lots of whaling ships and whalers out there: it's a really small population. It's kinda like killing poachers: there just aren't very many of them, so extermination is a viable solution, though obviously grim. That's why countries trying to protect their endangered animals have adopted the extermination route.
Assassinating the President is actually a pretty stupid thing to do if you think about it. It's not like the country is going to change course 180 degrees if you do that, plus you can kiss your life goodbye (either shot, or jailed forever). It's really more of a symbolic act than anything, a way of getting attention, or a product of mental disorder. Look at the last assassination attempt (Reagan): the assassin was a lunatic. JFK's killer (putting aside any conspiracy theories for the moment) was mentally unbalanced. (Or, maybe he was set up by someone else, who took advantage of his mental state.) Lincoln's killer was also mentally unbalanced, and pissed about the Civil War.
Similarly, terrorist acts really don't make that much sense if you're trying to accomplish real change. Killing a few dozen people isn't going to affect population numbers in any significant way, and as we've seen, it doesn't affect policy much, in fact it usually makes it much worse for whatever group sponsored the terrorists by creating blowback: the attacked nation unleashes their military and bombs the shit out of wherever the terrorists came from. I guess you could argue it helps their cause by killing their own people, driving more of them to joining the terrorists, but that seems rather short-sighted, though that is a common human failing. But unlike sinking whaling ships, it's not going to fix your problem quickly.
Simply put: if you sank a small handful of whaling ships tomorrow, whaling would end for a while (they'd need to build or outfit some new ones), and quite possibly for good if it puts the whalers out of business which it very well could. But killing the president or murdering a few dozen people in a terrorist action is not going to, for instance, cause western nations to suddenly pull out of the Middle East or convert to Islam. So I don't think the mentality is quite the same. The first, while exceeding most people's boundaries of appropriate action, makes some logical sense, if in a brutal fashion. The second, does not.
Well for the people who care about this, they only see people as a "minority" if they're a racial minority that generally doesn't do well economically in the US. So Jewish people (which isn't really a race, there are many different ethnicities of Jews) and Asians don't count. The full term is "disadvantaged minorities". Somehow Asians don't get this status because, while they're certainly a minority, they actually do really well scholastically and economically, usually a lot better than Caucasians on average.
Growing new ones sounds unworkable. I skimmed the article and couldn't find any mention about how long they think it would take, but think about it: how long did it take you to grow those teeth in the first place? Quite a while; that's why we have "baby teeth", while the new ones are growing into place.
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't want to wait a year for a replacement tooth to grow into place. Current methods don't have this problem: you can be in and out of the dentist's office in a few hours at most and be ready to use your new tooth/teeth.
Also, real teeth actually suck. They're too easy to damage, they rot easily, they're just not very durable. They also stain easily and require regular whitening treatments. It'd be better if we just had them all replaced with fake ones. The only reason we don't do this is because it's too expensive, so only rich Hollywood actors bother with it.
You're thinking of carbon nanotubes. Graphene is flat sheets of carbon, not tubes.
Is there a more stupid argument than "my country's beer is better than yours"?
Actually, it seems like the argument is more like "my country's beer is the worst!" "No, my country's beer is the worst!"
No, it's not. Glucose is a sugar which your cells can utilize directly. Fructose is a sugar that your liver has to process, much like alcohol.