There's a couple of differences between America and the Roman Empire: 1) The Roman Empire took 500 years to finally collapse (at least the western portion, the Eastern portion took much longer), and that was only after the Roman Republic existed for 500 years.
2) Rome has a lot more than a flag left standing; their concrete quality was far superior to modern concrete, so there's all kinds of Roman-built stuff still standing and in pretty good shape considering it's 2000 years old. Anything we make out of concrete is usually falling apart after 50 years.
The only people I ever see acting like their country is "the best" overall are Americans. A country can be "best" in certain areas, but I don't really see any one country as being "the best" overall.
It's called "nationalism". In the Western nations, it seems to be mostly restricted to the US these days, however a century ago most of the people in European nations had extremely nationalistic sentiments. It led directly to World War I.
In the US, lots of people also like Honey Boo Boo and The Kardashians.
Making driver easier and more relaxing is not a good thing; that just feeds Americans' laziness and makes them more prone to have crashes. It also enables them to do things that distract from driving, such as texting.
It only seems backwards to you because you're not looking at it from the driver's point-of-view, and instead from the machine's point-of-view. Are you an engineer?
This has nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with Federal Law, which defines active and passive according to the interaction required by the driver.
No, manual seat belts are active: they require the driver to do something to make them work. Airbags are passive: drivers don't have to do anything at all, they just work.
It helps but it's still not as good (except maybe for some odd cases where they seem to put in a higher top gear for the auto than the manual, leading to better highway MPG for the auto and better city MPG for the stick). And they never get rid of that annoying slushy shifting. Again, this is all moot with the DSGs which don't have these problems, since there's no torque converter in those and these transmissions generally beat the manuals in both city and highway MPGs, plus having much, much faster shifts.
How many of these are actually common on normal cars?
1) Auto trans
These are clearly inferior to manual transmissions in every way, except for some of the most recent models with the advent of DSG transmissions (which are mechanically nothing like an actual "automatic transmission").
2) self-locking doors
These are somewhat common, but it's such a simple function it can hardly be compared to an auto trans.
3) auto ride control
Not present on normal, non-luxury cars, and definitely not on any performance-oriented cars.
4) auto headlights/self-diming & on-off
Still mostly confined to American luxury cars, though becoming more common in lower-end cars, but again a fairly simple function.
5) automatic seat belts
Completely and utter failure, so bad that they were completely eliminated when airbags became standard issue. They only existed on cars because the US had a stupid law requiring passive safety devices, which could be satisfied either with an airbag or an automatic seat belt, so manufacturers trying to cut costs went with the seatbelts (aka "mouse belts"). It was particularly funny when some cars came with a driver's side airbag but an automatic seatbelt on the passenger side (since airbags were so expensive back then), but on the driver's side, instead of having a matching automatic seatbelt, then had a good ol' manual belt, making it obvious that the automatic belt wasn't an improvement in any way. Now that every car has airbags (and a bunch of them), they ALL have completely manual seat belts.
6) airbags
Red herring. Airbags are passive safety devices, not a device to automatically do something the driver had to do previously.
7) proximity keyless entry
Still not present in that many cars, an expensive option in many, and again a fairly simple function with today's wireless tech.
8) ABS
This one is everywhere now, and really the only thing in your list that supports your argument. Since it's impossible for a driver to modulate the brake calipers at each wheel independently, ABS makes sense, plus it only comes on when there's a large discrepancy in wheelspeeds, not in normal driving, so it's rarely used.
9) lane drift monitoring 10) auto brake on object detect
Don't exist except in a few ~$100k cars.
The problem with auto transmissions is that they aren't actually better than the manual function they replace (again, except arguably for DSG transmissions, which are only found in a couple of makes, namely VW and its subsidiaries and also some Fords). They have significantly reduced performance, greatly increased complexity and reduced reliability, and significantly reduced fuel economy. Maybe when DSGs completely take over and the slushboxes are retired to the dustbin of history, we can stop having arguments like this, but as long as torque converters are used, automatics will never be as good as manuals.
It is. Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm getting really sick of the giant monster cases when it's now possible to pack everything onto a miniITX motherboard, and the big PC makers like Lenovo and HP have lots of "small form factor" desktop PCs available that have far better designs than anything in the build-it-yourself market, and are much quieter too even without water cooling. The build-it-yourself stuff hasn't even changed in 10 years; it's all exactly the same.
Water cooling would be a lot more useful if there were some genuinely nice, well-designed cases out there to put these water-cooling systems into. Even the high-end cases aren't very good; they're much too large, they're plasticky and cheap, they don't have toolless drive bays, they have way too many drive bays, etc. This isn't 1993 any more; we don't need cases with 10 5.25" drive bays. And why does anyone bother with full-size ATX motherboards any more? No one uses expansion cards any more, except for GPU cards; this isn't 1993 where every function on a system was on a separate expansion card.
Why can't someone make a really nice, metal, miniITX system with space for 2 hard drives that doesn't look like some cheap, gaudy plastic-front POS?
I don't think it's any surprise that a developing country isn't as good as the US in many ways, even though the US has been flagging a lot in the last decade or more.
Instead of comparing the US to various underdeveloped countries rife with corruption, or with autocratic governments, we should be comparing it with the countries which lead the world economically and in many quality-of-life indices, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, and Japan. America always claims to be #1, but compared to countries like this, it's not.
It depends on what you're trying to do. For online banking and stuff like that, sure, you don't want to have to download some stupid proprietary application just to do that.
However, what if you're building a custom application for use in a business to manage payroll, or handle sales contacts, or do some other highly specialized business function (that only people in that business would understand the need for)? A lot of people seem to want to make web apps for these things, but there's a lot of problems with that approach, as web apps simply don't offer the performance and functionality that native apps do on a desktop PC/Mac platform.
>probably like 3/4 of the people are different now than they were back then.
That's irrelevant. The "people" you refer to are nothing more than hired guns, they're not the company. The company is the executives and the shareholders and the board. The shareholders come and go for the most part, except the big shareholders, who are also the board members and executives. So really, the way I see it, the "company" is the people who run the company at the top, and those people haven't changed in decades. Bill and Steve have been running the place as long as I can remember. So as long as Steve is running the place and Bill is hanging around and helping patent trolls, I'm going to hold a grudge. MS isn't like a normal company where the executives come and go over the years and the ownership completely changes hands over time.
Citation needed. And any stats that are based on PC sales are bullshit since almost all Linux installs are done on hardware that was purchased with Windows pre-installed.
I hate Apple and MS; Google I'm still a bit on the fence about but their massive amount of tracking and information-gathering plus ties to the NSA have made me move to using DuckDuckGo for all my searches lately. But as you said, I hate then in varying amounts, and MS is at the top of the list (though Apple has been rising a lot in recent years, mostly thanks to their patent trolling).
So when I see MS complaining about Google fucking them over, I honestly don't care. It's like a Mafia boss whining about some rival boss screwing him over in a business deal; what comes around, goes around. If Google were fucking someone else over, I might care a little more, but because it's MS, who has done the same and much worse to so many other companies over the years, I can only laugh. If Google were fucking over users (the way MS has done for most of its existence), then it'd raise my Google hate-meter. But if Google wants to "do evil" to MS, that's really fine by me. Cry me a river, MS.
That's all fine and well, but you have to realize that you're in an extreme minority here. When someone Asks Slashdot about giving notice, or any other job-related thing, it's generally safe to assume they're talking about an IT or engineering job, not sales/marketing, HR, or anything else. Advice that makes sense for IT/engineering jobs is frequently not going to apply to other jobs.
So you think someone should sit around and willingly accept abuse so that they aren't considered an "asshole" by simply getting up and walking out?
So a wife who suddenly packs up and leaves her abusive husband with no notice is an "asshole" because she didn't stick around and try to work things out or work for a smoother transition?
Or a customer who's being verbally insulted by a store proprietor is an "asshole" for turning around and walking out of the store, instead of staying there and accepting his insults?
That's a giant gamble. Taking advantage of that opportunity, IF it actually materializes, depends on you being unemployed!! Why would you sit around doing nothing waiting for this possible contracting opportunity? Moreover, if the employer is such a cheap-ass they're dumping experienced people and outsourcing just to save a few bucks, what makes you think they're going to pay big bucks when they want some consulting help from prior employees? People like that don't think that way; at best, they might pay you slightly more than your old salary, for a short time, to help smooth things over. You're much better off forgetting about that place, and finding a new job ASAP. A full-time job with a high salary is worth much more than a short-term gig with a crappy ex-employer at a slightly inflated rate.
You're still assuming things, and haven't addressed the prior question: how does quitting immediately make someone an "asshole"? Respectful treatment is a two-way street; if the employer doesn't treat the employee with respect, there's no reason for the employee to bend over backwards to make things easier for the employer. It's better to save your time and find a new job ASAP.
Yep, I'm the same way: I walked out on a job a few years ago because the boss was giving me shit about coming in late, even though I always came in late, and always left late, and got more work done after 5 when everyone else left. There were a bunch of other factors about that job that I was already sick of (like the idiotic open-plan work environment), so my boss getting on me about being late (and then pulling me into a talk where he asked me why I was there; why else would I be there but for a paycheck?) was the last straw; I tossed a resignation letter at him and walked out.
Except that no one invests in training any more; they only want to hire experienced people. As for salespeople taking customers, this is Slashdot, so the main industries being discussed here are IT and engineering (and most of that is probably software engineering). This isn't a forum for salespeople, marketers, etc.
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because European countries don't export their culture (e.g., TV and movies) the same way as the US.
They should. British TV shows are far superior to the total ADD-addled dreck that American TV shows. (I say that as an American.)
There's a couple of differences between America and the Roman Empire:
1) The Roman Empire took 500 years to finally collapse (at least the western portion, the Eastern portion took much longer), and that was only after the Roman Republic existed for 500 years.
2) Rome has a lot more than a flag left standing; their concrete quality was far superior to modern concrete, so there's all kinds of Roman-built stuff still standing and in pretty good shape considering it's 2000 years old. Anything we make out of concrete is usually falling apart after 50 years.
The only people I ever see acting like their country is "the best" overall are Americans. A country can be "best" in certain areas, but I don't really see any one country as being "the best" overall.
It's called "nationalism". In the Western nations, it seems to be mostly restricted to the US these days, however a century ago most of the people in European nations had extremely nationalistic sentiments. It led directly to World War I.
In the US, lots of people also like Honey Boo Boo and The Kardashians.
Making driver easier and more relaxing is not a good thing; that just feeds Americans' laziness and makes them more prone to have crashes. It also enables them to do things that distract from driving, such as texting.
It only seems backwards to you because you're not looking at it from the driver's point-of-view, and instead from the machine's point-of-view. Are you an engineer?
This has nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with Federal Law, which defines active and passive according to the interaction required by the driver.
No, manual seat belts are active: they require the driver to do something to make them work. Airbags are passive: drivers don't have to do anything at all, they just work.
It helps but it's still not as good (except maybe for some odd cases where they seem to put in a higher top gear for the auto than the manual, leading to better highway MPG for the auto and better city MPG for the stick). And they never get rid of that annoying slushy shifting. Again, this is all moot with the DSGs which don't have these problems, since there's no torque converter in those and these transmissions generally beat the manuals in both city and highway MPGs, plus having much, much faster shifts.
How many of these are actually common on normal cars?
1) Auto trans
These are clearly inferior to manual transmissions in every way, except for some of the most recent models with the advent of DSG transmissions (which are mechanically nothing like an actual "automatic transmission").
2) self-locking doors
These are somewhat common, but it's such a simple function it can hardly be compared to an auto trans.
3) auto ride control
Not present on normal, non-luxury cars, and definitely not on any performance-oriented cars.
4) auto headlights/self-diming & on-off
Still mostly confined to American luxury cars, though becoming more common in lower-end cars, but again a fairly simple function.
5) automatic seat belts
Completely and utter failure, so bad that they were completely eliminated when airbags became standard issue. They only existed on cars because the US had a stupid law requiring passive safety devices, which could be satisfied either with an airbag or an automatic seat belt, so manufacturers trying to cut costs went with the seatbelts (aka "mouse belts"). It was particularly funny when some cars came with a driver's side airbag but an automatic seatbelt on the passenger side (since airbags were so expensive back then), but on the driver's side, instead of having a matching automatic seatbelt, then had a good ol' manual belt, making it obvious that the automatic belt wasn't an improvement in any way. Now that every car has airbags (and a bunch of them), they ALL have completely manual seat belts.
6) airbags
Red herring. Airbags are passive safety devices, not a device to automatically do something the driver had to do previously.
7) proximity keyless entry
Still not present in that many cars, an expensive option in many, and again a fairly simple function with today's wireless tech.
8) ABS
This one is everywhere now, and really the only thing in your list that supports your argument. Since it's impossible for a driver to modulate the brake calipers at each wheel independently, ABS makes sense, plus it only comes on when there's a large discrepancy in wheelspeeds, not in normal driving, so it's rarely used.
9) lane drift monitoring
10) auto brake on object detect
Don't exist except in a few ~$100k cars.
The problem with auto transmissions is that they aren't actually better than the manual function they replace (again, except arguably for DSG transmissions, which are only found in a couple of makes, namely VW and its subsidiaries and also some Fords). They have significantly reduced performance, greatly increased complexity and reduced reliability, and significantly reduced fuel economy. Maybe when DSGs completely take over and the slushboxes are retired to the dustbin of history, we can stop having arguments like this, but as long as torque converters are used, automatics will never be as good as manuals.
It is. Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm getting really sick of the giant monster cases when it's now possible to pack everything onto a miniITX motherboard, and the big PC makers like Lenovo and HP have lots of "small form factor" desktop PCs available that have far better designs than anything in the build-it-yourself market, and are much quieter too even without water cooling. The build-it-yourself stuff hasn't even changed in 10 years; it's all exactly the same.
Water cooling would be a lot more useful if there were some genuinely nice, well-designed cases out there to put these water-cooling systems into. Even the high-end cases aren't very good; they're much too large, they're plasticky and cheap, they don't have toolless drive bays, they have way too many drive bays, etc. This isn't 1993 any more; we don't need cases with 10 5.25" drive bays. And why does anyone bother with full-size ATX motherboards any more? No one uses expansion cards any more, except for GPU cards; this isn't 1993 where every function on a system was on a separate expansion card.
Why can't someone make a really nice, metal, miniITX system with space for 2 hard drives that doesn't look like some cheap, gaudy plastic-front POS?
I don't think it's any surprise that a developing country isn't as good as the US in many ways, even though the US has been flagging a lot in the last decade or more.
Instead of comparing the US to various underdeveloped countries rife with corruption, or with autocratic governments, we should be comparing it with the countries which lead the world economically and in many quality-of-life indices, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, and Japan. America always claims to be #1, but compared to countries like this, it's not.
It depends on what you're trying to do. For online banking and stuff like that, sure, you don't want to have to download some stupid proprietary application just to do that.
However, what if you're building a custom application for use in a business to manage payroll, or handle sales contacts, or do some other highly specialized business function (that only people in that business would understand the need for)? A lot of people seem to want to make web apps for these things, but there's a lot of problems with that approach, as web apps simply don't offer the performance and functionality that native apps do on a desktop PC/Mac platform.
I completely agree.
>probably like 3/4 of the people are different now than they were back then.
That's irrelevant. The "people" you refer to are nothing more than hired guns, they're not the company. The company is the executives and the shareholders and the board. The shareholders come and go for the most part, except the big shareholders, who are also the board members and executives. So really, the way I see it, the "company" is the people who run the company at the top, and those people haven't changed in decades. Bill and Steve have been running the place as long as I can remember. So as long as Steve is running the place and Bill is hanging around and helping patent trolls, I'm going to hold a grudge. MS isn't like a normal company where the executives come and go over the years and the ownership completely changes hands over time.
As long as they direct most the evil directly at MS, I don't see how it's a problem.
>Linux has less than 1% of desktop.
Citation needed. And any stats that are based on PC sales are bullshit since almost all Linux installs are done on hardware that was purchased with Windows pre-installed.
I hate Apple and MS; Google I'm still a bit on the fence about but their massive amount of tracking and information-gathering plus ties to the NSA have made me move to using DuckDuckGo for all my searches lately. But as you said, I hate then in varying amounts, and MS is at the top of the list (though Apple has been rising a lot in recent years, mostly thanks to their patent trolling).
So when I see MS complaining about Google fucking them over, I honestly don't care. It's like a Mafia boss whining about some rival boss screwing him over in a business deal; what comes around, goes around. If Google were fucking someone else over, I might care a little more, but because it's MS, who has done the same and much worse to so many other companies over the years, I can only laugh. If Google were fucking over users (the way MS has done for most of its existence), then it'd raise my Google hate-meter. But if Google wants to "do evil" to MS, that's really fine by me. Cry me a river, MS.
That's all fine and well, but you have to realize that you're in an extreme minority here. When someone Asks Slashdot about giving notice, or any other job-related thing, it's generally safe to assume they're talking about an IT or engineering job, not sales/marketing, HR, or anything else. Advice that makes sense for IT/engineering jobs is frequently not going to apply to other jobs.
So you think someone should sit around and willingly accept abuse so that they aren't considered an "asshole" by simply getting up and walking out?
So a wife who suddenly packs up and leaves her abusive husband with no notice is an "asshole" because she didn't stick around and try to work things out or work for a smoother transition?
Or a customer who's being verbally insulted by a store proprietor is an "asshole" for turning around and walking out of the store, instead of staying there and accepting his insults?
You're an idiot.
What a load of crap. Sports might be important to many men, but most women don't give a shit about them.
That's a giant gamble. Taking advantage of that opportunity, IF it actually materializes, depends on you being unemployed!! Why would you sit around doing nothing waiting for this possible contracting opportunity? Moreover, if the employer is such a cheap-ass they're dumping experienced people and outsourcing just to save a few bucks, what makes you think they're going to pay big bucks when they want some consulting help from prior employees? People like that don't think that way; at best, they might pay you slightly more than your old salary, for a short time, to help smooth things over. You're much better off forgetting about that place, and finding a new job ASAP. A full-time job with a high salary is worth much more than a short-term gig with a crappy ex-employer at a slightly inflated rate.
You're still assuming things, and haven't addressed the prior question: how does quitting immediately make someone an "asshole"? Respectful treatment is a two-way street; if the employer doesn't treat the employee with respect, there's no reason for the employee to bend over backwards to make things easier for the employer. It's better to save your time and find a new job ASAP.
Yep, I'm the same way: I walked out on a job a few years ago because the boss was giving me shit about coming in late, even though I always came in late, and always left late, and got more work done after 5 when everyone else left. There were a bunch of other factors about that job that I was already sick of (like the idiotic open-plan work environment), so my boss getting on me about being late (and then pulling me into a talk where he asked me why I was there; why else would I be there but for a paycheck?) was the last straw; I tossed a resignation letter at him and walked out.
Except that no one invests in training any more; they only want to hire experienced people. As for salespeople taking customers, this is Slashdot, so the main industries being discussed here are IT and engineering (and most of that is probably software engineering). This isn't a forum for salespeople, marketers, etc.