Yep, Minix is one of those things where it sounds good in theory, not so much in practice. There's a reason there's no true microkernel designs out there dominating any markets.
That's what student loans are for. I didn't have much in the way of scholarships (I think I got a total of $500 in scholarships while I was in college), so I got through partially by working (co-op/internship) and mostly with student loans. Of course, back then college wasn't quite as expensive as now, but still I wound up with $26K in loans at the end, which I paid off within 3 years.
Part of the key, of course, is to choose a major that's going to get you a good-paying job. Don't take out $50K in loans and then major in Women's Studies or Theater.
Companies can't carry out expensive lawsuits unless they have lots of money to do so. A start-up with no customers at all isn't going to get anywhere with that kind of thinking. No VC is going to throw money at a start-up whose business plan is to start suing the government (since the existing taxi situation is the product of collusion between local governments and taxi companies). Now that Uber's flouted the law and made lots of money, they *can* do this, so maybe that's their plan.
Yeah, things are different in different regions/markets/jurisdictions, and I think a lot of people are arguing for or against Uber based on their personal experiences, which are going to vary wildly from place to place. In my experience, Uber was wonderful, but that's because the taxis in northern New Jersey are simply horrible, but that's the only place I've used it. So to me, in NNJ, Uber was a giant improvement over the existing services and I'd use them any time. But for someone in Netherlands, maybe it's not such a huge improvement, or an apparent improvement at all, only cheaper.
Where I live taxis are plentiful and unless a special event is happening, getting a taxi is as easy as picking up your phone. The cab is there before I can get my jacket on and walk down to the door. Most big taxi companies here already have their apps, so you don't have to worry about using your phone to make an actual call to a living person. What does Uber offer me?
Well here in America, it offers me an app so I don't have to try to figure out where the nearest cab company is. We never had that before Uber, in most locales. Our taxi companies are absolutely backwards here; they don't use GPS, they take meandering routes to increase fares, they don't stop for black people, their cars are filthy, I could go on and on.
If taxis are great where you are, then fine--count yourself lucky. Here in the US, they're miserable, and that's precisely why Uber has done so well here.
That's really not the problem. Supposedly, Uber insures cars used by its drivers while they're on calls anyway.
The problem is the whole corrupt medallion system which limits competition. Limiting competition does nothing but drive up prices. That's what Uber was getting around; somehow they're able to pay people to drive their personal vehicles (and they only allow people with *nice* vehicles too, nothing more than 10 years old) and still deliver rates to the customer that are half as much. That's probably partly because of excessive regulatory costs (the $1M medallions and the like), and partly because the taxi companies have formed cartels which have driven up the prices. And also partly because in some places, the drivers take meandering routes; Uber never does that since their drivers all use GPS mapping.
Well, for one thing, taxis are required to give rides to everybody, even people of different faiths/colors/nationalities.
Then why don't they? It's common knowledge in NYC that taxis won't pick up black people, and lots of black people have sung the praises of Uber because they can get an Uber ride while yellow taxis will drive right by them.
And they're required to go basically anywhere the passenger wants to go.
Then why don't they? It's common knowledge in NYC that cabs won't go to certain parts of the city (which is also the main reason they won't pick up black people).
Additionally, there are penalties in place for drivers who take meandering paths, not just a changeable "company policy" against it.
But this is never enforced. I've seen this myself. Cab drivers take you some weird, back route way that takes twice as long, and they don't even have a GPS. Uber drivers use Google Maps and take you the shortest route possible.
What you're touting sounds good in theory, but in practice it's never, ever enforced. This is why everyone likes Uber so much: it gives them the things they should have gotten with cabs, but didn't.
You don't need to deregulate taxis, you just need to change the laws and do some political maneuvering to push Uber into being a giant taxi company. It's a lot easier for the government to regulate a big, rich company (=deep pockets) rather than a bunch of small companies.
I honestly don't see why you consider yourself libertarian at all. Almost everyone who actually uses that label seems to be an Ayn Rand and Objectivism fan. The views you support here are classic left-of-center thinking, exactly what I agree with, and pretty close to what Sanders advocates: liberals have almost always been in favor of "libertarianism" for social issues (gay marriage, etc.), while not so much for economic issues where they believe in a social safety net, strong government services (libraries, roads, etc.), and regulation of corporate behavior, while still supporting (mostly) free enterprise economics, and of course keeping religion far away from government.
the biggest obstacle to a sanders presidency is not tea party morons. they vote. that's what you're suppose to fucking do the biggest obstacle is liberals who don't fucking vote
Well that's why we need someone like Sanders on the ballot. When you just have people like Hillary on the Democrat side of the ballot, then of course liberals don't vote. When someone like Sanders is on the ballot, then people get excited and think they're making a difference instead of voting for another corrupt politician.
It happened before, with Hillary: she appeared to be a shoe-in for the Democrats in 2008, and then suddenly Obama appeared, got people excited about hope and change, and Hillary was a has-been. The Obama was such a big disappointment that liberals didn't bother to vote much, especially in mid-term elections. Now we have Sanders, and unlike Obama, Sanders actually has a very long political history which backs up his rhetoric.
Sanders isn't a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. He's a self-proclaimed Socialist (though I imagine Socialists in Europe probably think he's farther to the right). Like most serious liberals, he's "libertarian" on social issues like gay marriage, it's the economic axis where socialists and libertarians diverge completely.
And running on a different Party's ticket is a sure way to not be elected. Sanders actually wants to be elected, that's pretty clear. He's doing almost the same thing Ron Paul did a while back, basically trying to swing the party towards his way of thinking by getting popular but sticking with an established party to try to co-opt it. Sanders seems to be having a lot more success however.
It depends on what election he's voting in, and on which side he considers the "lesser of two evils".
For instance, if he thinks the Democrats are better, and it's a Presidential election, then he is absolutely wasting his vote if he votes for the Democratic candidate in Texas or Alabama. There's no way the (D) candidate will take those states, so you might as well vote 3rd-party to show support for that. Same goes if he leans more towards Republican ideology and he's in Connecticut.
However, if he's in Florida or Ohio, it's an entirely different matter. Swing states are the only states where your vote actually matters in a Presidential race.
The same principle works in other elections too, just differently depending on your state (for Senatorial or Gubernatorial races) or Congressional district (for House of Representatives races). Voting Democrat in some of California's eastern counties is a waste of a vote, while voting Republican in the California general election is too.
Huh? The Tea Party morons win elections because in the Congressional districts where they win, the majority of the people there agree with them. Just look at the places where they've won: they're districts dominated by Republicans, not places where liberals have any big effect. The most famous instance is Eric Cantor (R) being ousted in Virginia for a TP candidate named Dave Brat (what a name!). That wasn't in some district with a significant liberal presence, it's been reliably voting Republican ever since 1971.
I'm pretty sure you will not find any examples of TP candidates winning races in districts which were not already dominated by Republicans. TPs are extremists, farther right than regular Republicans, so they're only going to be popular in places which already are pretty far-right. In those districts, it doesn't matter how many liberals get out and vote, they're still going to lose, no matter what, unless they can all somehow get together and enact a secret plan to drug most of the Republican voters on Election Day so they can't get to the polls before they close.
Option 1 is obviously ridiculous, but I'm dubious about option 2 actually working. How about option 3: go back to having an oppressive ruler who keeps everyone under control? It worked in the past, after all.
The last thing I heard about was the destruction at Palmyra, which is about 2000 years old.
2000 years ago, Rome was in its heyday. The Roman Empire controlled most of Europe at that time; there were no "country-sized kingdoms", that wasn't for another 1000 years.
Also 2000 years ago, Islam did not exist. It didn't come around until 700-something AD IIRC. That's the whole reason ISIS is destroying those places: because they're NOT Islamic, they predate it.
It was somewhere around 700-1000 years ago when Christian Europe was constantly at war and was burning "heretics" at the stake, while Islamic regions were generally peaceful and had thriving science and math (but not so much art; all their art is purely geometric because they think it's somehow wrong to paint pictures of people or anything else that's real). At some point, a new line of thought took over in the Islamic world and they turned to a more fundamentalist version of the religion, and things have done downhill ever since, while the European countries went through the Renaissance and the Age of Reason/Enlightenment and have steadily turned away from religion.
Not only that, their camp can grow and grow, and pretty soon they're electing a new far-right-wing Chancellor who turns into a dictator....
When you don't listen to the people and just let their anger fester, you get really horrible results. And a good part of the blame can be directed to the people who refused to address their concerns, just like much of blame for WWII falls at the feet of Britain and France for their shitty treaty.
Even the classic Gnome vs KDE has resulted in each becoming better.
No it hasn't. Gnome has been getting worse ever since 1.0. There's certainly been lots of development work on it since those days, but it's only made it worse, not better. It's no different than Windows: everything GUI-wise since Vista has been a step backwards.
Right, the other way is the Microsoft method where you create an API and just let everyone else write driver code for their own devices. Then you get tons of horribly-written drivers, all running in privileged mode inside the kernel, and every time one of them has a problem, you get a blue screen. It doesn't matter how great your kernel is because just one shitty third-party driver will crash it.
This very problem has dogged Microsoft for decades now. The only ways they've gotten around it are 1) adopting part of the Linux model of making their own drivers for many commonly-used peripherals and including those as part of Windows, and 2) instituting the WHQL program to have MS test out third-party drivers and check their quality. The latter option simply isn't doable for Linux, because it requires a large, for-profit organization maintaining the OS and which is able to set up something of that scale, and it also requires the OS to already be in a market position where hardware makers are willing to pay high fees to have their drivers checked and certified by the OS vendor under this program. Almost no one is going to pay $$$$$ to have some company (or something like the Linux Foundation) thoroughly check their closed-source drivers, because Linux marketshare outside the server room is puny.
On top of this, Linux does have a big presence in the embedded sector, but here there's loads of closed-source drivers with varying quality, and it's caused a lot of problems.
Finally, being able to change interfaces at a whim when things change (such as when WiFi standards are amended) is a big advantage; having a fixed API/ABI makes that impossible, so you end up with workarounds like multiple API versions, which results in kernel bloat and performance loss.
The other thing you could do is go to a pure microkernel design, but there again you get performance loss.
That's weird, way back when I went to college, they didn't give a shit what my high school GPA was, they only cared about my SAT scores. My SAT scores were really high, so I got accepted nearly anywhere I applied, even though I certainly wasn't valedictorian or even close.
I actually seem to remember some controversy about this a couple of decades ago, and one actual example they gave about a standardized test was a question about a regatta. Anyone who knows nothing about boats will have no idea what a regatta is. Most kids today probably have no idea, and a lot of adults too.
You can also blame moms who picked crappy men to father their children. I think this is something parents need to drill into the heads of their daughters when they're young: don't pick assholes or morons to date, because if you get pregnant by them, you're now stuck with a relationship with this deadbeat, and a kid you have to take care of, probably alone, after he takes off, and now not many other men will want to date you since you're stuck with someone else's kid and a relationship with the father.
I wouldn't want to give random, untraceable people the ability to tamper with packages either.
Well presumably, these drivers wouldn't be people who just signed up that day with their phone, they'd have to go through some kind of application process with Amazon to get this job, and then Amazon would track which drivers got which packages.
The problem is there are no choices because size is one of the few factors carriers/manufacturers can point to that shows the phone is newer and "better" than the old models.
So obviously, most phone buyers care about screen size, otherwise mfgrs wouldn't tout this as such an important point.
Honestly, other than screen size is the S6 a Massive jump from an S5? If you know about phones, yes, but to a layman, not so much.
Yes, and layman are the people buying the vast majority of phones.
People agree, they may not be the majority, but there are plenty of us out there.
Apparently not enough for the phone makers to care. Either that, or these people who supposedly agree aren't actually refusing to buy the new big-screen devices, and are just caving in. Well, if you buy a big-screen device, then it's presumed that you DO want it and do care about having a big screen. If you don't want a big screen device, don't buy one. If you act like a bunch of sheep and just buy whatever the mfgrs decide to put on the market, then you shouldn't complain about what they're selling you. This is exactly why we get crap like Windows Metro (8-10 UI): so many morons just cave in and buy it that it constitutes silent assent. If you really care about something, hold out or buy an older device that suits you better.
Windows 10 is actually a pretty good example IMO. MS, having pretty close to monopoly power, put out Windows 8 with the shitty new UI, and the sales were abysmal. So they actually responded by making some changes with 8.1. It still didn't turn things around that much, so now they have 10, with bonus spyware features!! But because they've persisted so long, and make a few small concessions with the desktop part, and made the first part free (like a cocaine dealer with the first hit), plenty of morons finally caved and installed it or bought it, so everyone's getting the Metro UI whether they like it or not.
If you truly believe in something, you have to stand up for it, and not be a stupid sheep and go along with the crowd, because when everyone just goes along with what some company or group of companies wants to push, we're going to get it whether we like it or not.
Yeah, if you can see the van, that's a good point.
What if you're in an apartment though, and don't have view of the street and didn't or couldn't hear the van pull up?
Also, what about other delivery services? Do you refuse to answer the door when you order a pizza and some guy driving his personal car shows up? Do you check to see if his car has a Domino's sign on top, or ask him for ID or call Domino's to make sure he's an employee there?
Remember also, this is supposedly a service so people can have stuff delivered from Amazon within an hour. It's not like Fedex when it could show up any time during the day; you place the order, and within an hour someone shows up with your item, not much different from pizza delivery really.
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Yep, Minix is one of those things where it sounds good in theory, not so much in practice. There's a reason there's no true microkernel designs out there dominating any markets.
That's what student loans are for. I didn't have much in the way of scholarships (I think I got a total of $500 in scholarships while I was in college), so I got through partially by working (co-op/internship) and mostly with student loans. Of course, back then college wasn't quite as expensive as now, but still I wound up with $26K in loans at the end, which I paid off within 3 years.
Part of the key, of course, is to choose a major that's going to get you a good-paying job. Don't take out $50K in loans and then major in Women's Studies or Theater.
Companies can't carry out expensive lawsuits unless they have lots of money to do so. A start-up with no customers at all isn't going to get anywhere with that kind of thinking. No VC is going to throw money at a start-up whose business plan is to start suing the government (since the existing taxi situation is the product of collusion between local governments and taxi companies). Now that Uber's flouted the law and made lots of money, they *can* do this, so maybe that's their plan.
Yeah, things are different in different regions/markets/jurisdictions, and I think a lot of people are arguing for or against Uber based on their personal experiences, which are going to vary wildly from place to place. In my experience, Uber was wonderful, but that's because the taxis in northern New Jersey are simply horrible, but that's the only place I've used it. So to me, in NNJ, Uber was a giant improvement over the existing services and I'd use them any time. But for someone in Netherlands, maybe it's not such a huge improvement, or an apparent improvement at all, only cheaper.
Where I live taxis are plentiful and unless a special event is happening, getting a taxi is as easy as picking up your phone. The cab is there before I can get my jacket on and walk down to the door. Most big taxi companies here already have their apps, so you don't have to worry about using your phone to make an actual call to a living person. What does Uber offer me?
Well here in America, it offers me an app so I don't have to try to figure out where the nearest cab company is. We never had that before Uber, in most locales. Our taxi companies are absolutely backwards here; they don't use GPS, they take meandering routes to increase fares, they don't stop for black people, their cars are filthy, I could go on and on.
If taxis are great where you are, then fine--count yourself lucky. Here in the US, they're miserable, and that's precisely why Uber has done so well here.
That's really not the problem. Supposedly, Uber insures cars used by its drivers while they're on calls anyway.
The problem is the whole corrupt medallion system which limits competition. Limiting competition does nothing but drive up prices. That's what Uber was getting around; somehow they're able to pay people to drive their personal vehicles (and they only allow people with *nice* vehicles too, nothing more than 10 years old) and still deliver rates to the customer that are half as much. That's probably partly because of excessive regulatory costs (the $1M medallions and the like), and partly because the taxi companies have formed cartels which have driven up the prices. And also partly because in some places, the drivers take meandering routes; Uber never does that since their drivers all use GPS mapping.
Well, for one thing, taxis are required to give rides to everybody, even people of different faiths/colors/nationalities.
Then why don't they? It's common knowledge in NYC that taxis won't pick up black people, and lots of black people have sung the praises of Uber because they can get an Uber ride while yellow taxis will drive right by them.
And they're required to go basically anywhere the passenger wants to go.
Then why don't they? It's common knowledge in NYC that cabs won't go to certain parts of the city (which is also the main reason they won't pick up black people).
Additionally, there are penalties in place for drivers who take meandering paths, not just a changeable "company policy" against it.
But this is never enforced. I've seen this myself. Cab drivers take you some weird, back route way that takes twice as long, and they don't even have a GPS. Uber drivers use Google Maps and take you the shortest route possible.
What you're touting sounds good in theory, but in practice it's never, ever enforced. This is why everyone likes Uber so much: it gives them the things they should have gotten with cabs, but didn't.
You don't need to deregulate taxis, you just need to change the laws and do some political maneuvering to push Uber into being a giant taxi company. It's a lot easier for the government to regulate a big, rich company (=deep pockets) rather than a bunch of small companies.
I honestly don't see why you consider yourself libertarian at all. Almost everyone who actually uses that label seems to be an Ayn Rand and Objectivism fan. The views you support here are classic left-of-center thinking, exactly what I agree with, and pretty close to what Sanders advocates: liberals have almost always been in favor of "libertarianism" for social issues (gay marriage, etc.), while not so much for economic issues where they believe in a social safety net, strong government services (libraries, roads, etc.), and regulation of corporate behavior, while still supporting (mostly) free enterprise economics, and of course keeping religion far away from government.
the biggest obstacle to a sanders presidency is not tea party morons. they vote. that's what you're suppose to fucking do
the biggest obstacle is liberals who don't fucking vote
Well that's why we need someone like Sanders on the ballot. When you just have people like Hillary on the Democrat side of the ballot, then of course liberals don't vote. When someone like Sanders is on the ballot, then people get excited and think they're making a difference instead of voting for another corrupt politician.
It happened before, with Hillary: she appeared to be a shoe-in for the Democrats in 2008, and then suddenly Obama appeared, got people excited about hope and change, and Hillary was a has-been. The Obama was such a big disappointment that liberals didn't bother to vote much, especially in mid-term elections. Now we have Sanders, and unlike Obama, Sanders actually has a very long political history which backs up his rhetoric.
Sanders isn't a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. He's a self-proclaimed Socialist (though I imagine Socialists in Europe probably think he's farther to the right). Like most serious liberals, he's "libertarian" on social issues like gay marriage, it's the economic axis where socialists and libertarians diverge completely.
And running on a different Party's ticket is a sure way to not be elected. Sanders actually wants to be elected, that's pretty clear. He's doing almost the same thing Ron Paul did a while back, basically trying to swing the party towards his way of thinking by getting popular but sticking with an established party to try to co-opt it. Sanders seems to be having a lot more success however.
It depends on what election he's voting in, and on which side he considers the "lesser of two evils".
For instance, if he thinks the Democrats are better, and it's a Presidential election, then he is absolutely wasting his vote if he votes for the Democratic candidate in Texas or Alabama. There's no way the (D) candidate will take those states, so you might as well vote 3rd-party to show support for that. Same goes if he leans more towards Republican ideology and he's in Connecticut.
However, if he's in Florida or Ohio, it's an entirely different matter. Swing states are the only states where your vote actually matters in a Presidential race.
The same principle works in other elections too, just differently depending on your state (for Senatorial or Gubernatorial races) or Congressional district (for House of Representatives races). Voting Democrat in some of California's eastern counties is a waste of a vote, while voting Republican in the California general election is too.
Huh? The Tea Party morons win elections because in the Congressional districts where they win, the majority of the people there agree with them. Just look at the places where they've won: they're districts dominated by Republicans, not places where liberals have any big effect. The most famous instance is Eric Cantor (R) being ousted in Virginia for a TP candidate named Dave Brat (what a name!). That wasn't in some district with a significant liberal presence, it's been reliably voting Republican ever since 1971.
I'm pretty sure you will not find any examples of TP candidates winning races in districts which were not already dominated by Republicans. TPs are extremists, farther right than regular Republicans, so they're only going to be popular in places which already are pretty far-right. In those districts, it doesn't matter how many liberals get out and vote, they're still going to lose, no matter what, unless they can all somehow get together and enact a secret plan to drug most of the Republican voters on Election Day so they can't get to the polls before they close.
Option 1 is obviously ridiculous, but I'm dubious about option 2 actually working. How about option 3: go back to having an oppressive ruler who keeps everyone under control? It worked in the past, after all.
The last thing I heard about was the destruction at Palmyra, which is about 2000 years old.
2000 years ago, Rome was in its heyday. The Roman Empire controlled most of Europe at that time; there were no "country-sized kingdoms", that wasn't for another 1000 years.
Also 2000 years ago, Islam did not exist. It didn't come around until 700-something AD IIRC. That's the whole reason ISIS is destroying those places: because they're NOT Islamic, they predate it.
It was somewhere around 700-1000 years ago when Christian Europe was constantly at war and was burning "heretics" at the stake, while Islamic regions were generally peaceful and had thriving science and math (but not so much art; all their art is purely geometric because they think it's somehow wrong to paint pictures of people or anything else that's real). At some point, a new line of thought took over in the Islamic world and they turned to a more fundamentalist version of the religion, and things have done downhill ever since, while the European countries went through the Renaissance and the Age of Reason/Enlightenment and have steadily turned away from religion.
Not only that, their camp can grow and grow, and pretty soon they're electing a new far-right-wing Chancellor who turns into a dictator....
When you don't listen to the people and just let their anger fester, you get really horrible results. And a good part of the blame can be directed to the people who refused to address their concerns, just like much of blame for WWII falls at the feet of Britain and France for their shitty treaty.
Yep, mass immigration - that's what America is founded on. And look how it turned out.
Yep, one of only a few countries where much of the population actually believe the Earth is 6000 years old, and fundamentalism is common.
Even the classic Gnome vs KDE has resulted in each becoming better.
No it hasn't. Gnome has been getting worse ever since 1.0. There's certainly been lots of development work on it since those days, but it's only made it worse, not better. It's no different than Windows: everything GUI-wise since Vista has been a step backwards.
That sounds like BS at the Federal level, but it sounds exactly like something that certain shitty little localities would want to try.
Right, the other way is the Microsoft method where you create an API and just let everyone else write driver code for their own devices. Then you get tons of horribly-written drivers, all running in privileged mode inside the kernel, and every time one of them has a problem, you get a blue screen. It doesn't matter how great your kernel is because just one shitty third-party driver will crash it.
This very problem has dogged Microsoft for decades now. The only ways they've gotten around it are 1) adopting part of the Linux model of making their own drivers for many commonly-used peripherals and including those as part of Windows, and 2) instituting the WHQL program to have MS test out third-party drivers and check their quality. The latter option simply isn't doable for Linux, because it requires a large, for-profit organization maintaining the OS and which is able to set up something of that scale, and it also requires the OS to already be in a market position where hardware makers are willing to pay high fees to have their drivers checked and certified by the OS vendor under this program. Almost no one is going to pay $$$$$ to have some company (or something like the Linux Foundation) thoroughly check their closed-source drivers, because Linux marketshare outside the server room is puny.
On top of this, Linux does have a big presence in the embedded sector, but here there's loads of closed-source drivers with varying quality, and it's caused a lot of problems.
Finally, being able to change interfaces at a whim when things change (such as when WiFi standards are amended) is a big advantage; having a fixed API/ABI makes that impossible, so you end up with workarounds like multiple API versions, which results in kernel bloat and performance loss.
The other thing you could do is go to a pure microkernel design, but there again you get performance loss.
That's weird, way back when I went to college, they didn't give a shit what my high school GPA was, they only cared about my SAT scores. My SAT scores were really high, so I got accepted nearly anywhere I applied, even though I certainly wasn't valedictorian or even close.
I actually seem to remember some controversy about this a couple of decades ago, and one actual example they gave about a standardized test was a question about a regatta. Anyone who knows nothing about boats will have no idea what a regatta is. Most kids today probably have no idea, and a lot of adults too.
You can also blame moms who picked crappy men to father their children. I think this is something parents need to drill into the heads of their daughters when they're young: don't pick assholes or morons to date, because if you get pregnant by them, you're now stuck with a relationship with this deadbeat, and a kid you have to take care of, probably alone, after he takes off, and now not many other men will want to date you since you're stuck with someone else's kid and a relationship with the father.
I wouldn't want to give random, untraceable people the ability to tamper with packages either.
Well presumably, these drivers wouldn't be people who just signed up that day with their phone, they'd have to go through some kind of application process with Amazon to get this job, and then Amazon would track which drivers got which packages.
The problem is there are no choices because size is one of the few factors carriers/manufacturers can point to that shows the phone is newer and "better" than the old models.
So obviously, most phone buyers care about screen size, otherwise mfgrs wouldn't tout this as such an important point.
Honestly, other than screen size is the S6 a Massive jump from an S5? If you know about phones, yes, but to a layman, not so much.
Yes, and layman are the people buying the vast majority of phones.
People agree, they may not be the majority, but there are plenty of us out there.
Apparently not enough for the phone makers to care. Either that, or these people who supposedly agree aren't actually refusing to buy the new big-screen devices, and are just caving in. Well, if you buy a big-screen device, then it's presumed that you DO want it and do care about having a big screen. If you don't want a big screen device, don't buy one. If you act like a bunch of sheep and just buy whatever the mfgrs decide to put on the market, then you shouldn't complain about what they're selling you. This is exactly why we get crap like Windows Metro (8-10 UI): so many morons just cave in and buy it that it constitutes silent assent. If you really care about something, hold out or buy an older device that suits you better.
Windows 10 is actually a pretty good example IMO. MS, having pretty close to monopoly power, put out Windows 8 with the shitty new UI, and the sales were abysmal. So they actually responded by making some changes with 8.1. It still didn't turn things around that much, so now they have 10, with bonus spyware features!! But because they've persisted so long, and make a few small concessions with the desktop part, and made the first part free (like a cocaine dealer with the first hit), plenty of morons finally caved and installed it or bought it, so everyone's getting the Metro UI whether they like it or not.
If you truly believe in something, you have to stand up for it, and not be a stupid sheep and go along with the crowd, because when everyone just goes along with what some company or group of companies wants to push, we're going to get it whether we like it or not.
Yeah, if you can see the van, that's a good point.
What if you're in an apartment though, and don't have view of the street and didn't or couldn't hear the van pull up?
Also, what about other delivery services? Do you refuse to answer the door when you order a pizza and some guy driving his personal car shows up? Do you check to see if his car has a Domino's sign on top, or ask him for ID or call Domino's to make sure he's an employee there?
Remember also, this is supposedly a service so people can have stuff delivered from Amazon within an hour. It's not like Fedex when it could show up any time during the day; you place the order, and within an hour someone shows up with your item, not much different from pizza delivery really.