I'm not disagreeing that you can't get good American beer. I'll also agree that the situation is entirely different than it was 25 years ago, when all the nice microbrews weren't available. However, as you said, quantities matter, and these microbrews are still just that: small volume, and the shitbrews are still much higher selling by far.
I don't think it's like Japanese vs. American either; it's getting closer to that, I'll grant you, but it's more like $100k cars vs. everything else; I see $100k+ cars fairly frequently in my city (Phoenix, esp. in the Scottsdale area); Lamborghinis, Aston Martins, Ferraris, Maseratis, Rollses, even a Tesla or two, etc. But the $15-30k cars are still by far the most common, of newer cars I see driving around.
So I don't think it's unfair to continue to make fun of "American beers". Most American beer, by volume, is crap, and most Americans like crappy beer (which is why they can sell that volume of it). When the shitbrews are out of business or have changed so they're not so horrible, then we can say "American beers" shouldn't be bashed any more, but it hasn't happened yet. It might one day; after all, whatever you may think of Ford cars today, they really aren't like the Pintos any more.
It's not much different on Linux. I set my wife up with Kubuntu on her laptop, and again the Konsole program is several layers deep (K -> Applications -> System -> Konsole). Of course, I have an icon on my bottom panel on my systems, but she never uses it so there's no shortcut on hers. She gets along just fine without it.
Ok, if USB keyboards and mice are OK, then how do you keep people from plugging in USB thumb drives? What about the contention above that USB ports are not allowed to be accessible? That's pretty hard to do with a USB keyboard or mouse.
Also, if you want to convert desalination outflow to usable table salt you have to clean it first. Economically undesirable in most cases. (But not all)
Why would that be? There's already lots of places where ocean water is evaporated into sea salt, to be used for human consumption. Why not just use desalination outflow for that and kill two birds with one stone?
Desalination, as a solution to fresh water needs, is expenSive, complicated and (generally) damaging. It is a "big problem". However, societies generally overlook big problems when they find a way to get things that they want (more). See: fracking.
Ok, but what's the alternative? If you have too many people in a place where there isn't enough freshwater to support them, what else are you going to do? No, executing excess population is not a viable solution.
Fracking is slightly different; people don't absolutely require petroleum products for life; there's other energy sources available, we're just too cheap and lazy to develop those. But people can't survive without freshwater.
Oh please. For one thing, we already have desalination plants in some places dumping brine back into the sea; obviously it's not a big problem. There's a lot of water in the oceans. Secondly, the highly concentrated brine from these graphene filters could potentially be valuable for harvesting sea salt. We already have giant sea salt plants, where basically ocean water is left to dry out so we can take the salt out; between humans taking sea salt and leaving the water, and taking water and leaving the salt, I don't think there's any net effect on the oceans. And these graphene filters could make sea salt harvesting potentially more efficient.
Ok, the explanation about RR makes perfect sense; I didn't realize they were separated but with the same name, much like Volvo (the car company is owned by Gealy of China, the heavy equipment company is entirely separate and still Swedish).
However, this still doesn't explain Jaguar.
I totally agree about privatization. We have the same problem here in the US; there's a handful of "too big to fail" banks, and when they were on the verge of failing, the government rushed in and bailed them out, but they get to keep all their profits. So in my view, the government has two responsibilities: 1) to own and manage any service that's essential and too important to fail, and which can't be reasonably done with competitive private companies (e.g., municipal water and sewer is a prime example of this, as are roads), and 2) for anything that's essential but can be done well with competing companies, the government needs to regulate them and make sure they don't merge into too few, too large companies which are then "too big to fail". If a private company is too important to fail, it shouldn't exist in the first place, that function should be done by a much larger number of smaller companies. Banking (not central banking, just the rest of it) is a good example of this; there should be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of banks, not a small handful that constitute a cartel.
Unfortunately, my views on this are extremely unpopular in the USA these days.
Um, I think you might have replied to the wrong post. I was merely pointing out how government requirements aren't always grounded in reality. Not allowing USB keyboards and mice would definitely be an example of this, because it's getting pretty hard to find a new PC these days that still uses PS/2. Another great example is the State of California's requirement a while ago (I think it got changed before it went into effect because of the uproar over how stupid it was) that devices procured by the state government not use gendered terms like "male" and "female", even though just about every electrical connector on the planet uses these terms out of necessity.
In short, it seems quite clear that the Neo devs are deliberately doing the absolute bare minimum to satisfy the GPL requirements (and to be able to use a ".org" domain, which may have significant tax implications)
I'm not an expert on domain names, but I'm pretty sure that anyone can get a.org domain if they want, and I don't think there's any requirements about being a non-profit nor are there any tax implications involved. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. My first employer out of college, a small 50-person company, had (and still has) a.org domain for their website, probably because the equivalent.com was already taken. This was way back in the late 90s too. As far as I can tell, at least in the last 15 years, there's been no real policing of domain names so that only non-profits and the like can get.orgs, even though it seems fairly obvious that this was the original intention. It's too bad, though, since I think it was a good idea, but the whole domain-name system is screwed to hell these days, not only with.com,.org, and.net all being interchangeable, then later with stupid extensions like.biz and.info, and now with total anarchy with any extension at all being allowed.
Actually, that's not such a bad idea I think. Lots of businesses operate entirely on the principle of taking advantage of peoples' ignorance or laziness or impatience; they provide a service so that if you're too lazy to do it yourself or don't have the time, they do it for you, but they're not stopping you from just doing it yourself. Too many businesses (like computer games back in the days when they had things like manual checks) try too hard to make it impossible for anyone to get around their toll gate, and end up spending so many resources in this pursuit that it hurts theor profitability or even ruins them, when they'd be better off just putting their product out there, ignoring the people who have more time than money and find ways around paying the "toll", and just focusing on the customers who DO pay and have better things to do than figure out ways of not paying, and making those people happy.
Stupid Slashdot again; they can spend lots of time revamping the UI, but they can't fix the broken moderation system after more than a decade. The lack of a "-1, Incorrect" moderation option has been a glaring error forever here.
This "official binaries" business is really perplexing IMO. Why would anyone want "official" binaries at all? In Linux-land, none of the distros ship binaries built by third parties, except for the few instances where they don't have a choice (Adobe Flash, etc.). For open-source software they distribute, they always maintain the source and build it themselves so that it's built for the right machine type/arch, uses the compiler they've selected, links properly to all the dependency libraries, etc.
I just don't see how this is any incentive at all. If it's going to be included with Linux distros in their repositories, the distros will build it themselves and that's what you'll be installing when you type "sudo apt-get install program"; however if the company makes it so the software isn't included with distros' respositories, it probably isn't going to become very popular.
The funny thing is, I can see why many of those really should be privatized (or shouldn't have even been government-controlled to begin with). Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.) Or an airline, or a steel company, or an aerospace company? However, gas (assuming this is the company that supplies natural gas for home heating) and water utilities IMO absolutely should be government-run, because those are essential utility services that citizens in a civilization need to survive in modern times, and they're not something where you can easily have competition (what are you going to do, install 10 independent sewer systems under the city so people can choose amongst them?). I can also see a good case for the telecom company being nationalized, or at least the company that owns and operates the "last mile" infrastructure that connects to everyone's homes.
Either you're full of shit, or things are much worse in other developed countries than I suspected. The US government is completely corrupt, it's just not noticeable at the local level (e.g., regular people don't have to bribe cops on a daily basis), but at the Federal level, it's completely obvious. What kind of country allows corporations to legally blatantly bribe politicians and buy their votes? You don't think that's corrupt?
Finally, ranking a country based on how its people perceive its level of corruption isn't exactly flawless methodology. Americans are so brainwashed that they really think corporations should be able to buy off politicians, so of course they're going to perceive the corruption as low.
Well for starters, when you say "use Gmail", that generally implies using the web interface, since that's what 99.9% of Gmail users do.
But secondly, I see some problems with using another email client, namely Gmail's use of tags (and also nested tags) and conversation views, which other clients may not support. The tags and the conversation views are two giant reasons to use Gmail in the first place, at least IMO.
That's a little different. The UK and the US have a "special relationship": UK is the US's bitch, so if you're in the UK, you need to follow US law as it applies to you there. The student might as well have been in the US. It's not quite the same as being in the US of course (after all, they haven't extradited Assange from there yet, but maybe they didn't want to try because of the publicity), but it's pretty close.
But that's a unique situation; with any other country, you should be safe. Just look at the Kim Dotcom case; the US prosecutors got totally slapped down on that one; NZ didn't go fully along with them. So, as I said, if you're in a country like Latvia, you obviously have nothing to worry about from the US MAFIAA.
Are you really that stupid? You're there to push imperialism and help American corporations profit. The American government is the one that's evil; who's going to protect us from them?
At least South Korea has some real basis in keeping the peace, but that was done over 50 years ago, before the American government was as corrupt as it is now. All the campaigns after that, especially the ones in the last 10 years, haven't been about "keeping the peace" at all. You don't invade a country to "keep the peace": we didn't invade Korea, they had already been invaded, just like we didn't invade France, as they had already been invaded. But we certainly did invade Afghanistan and Iran.
1. Respecting *SOME* of a regions customs and curtesies helps prevent you from making enemies of *EVERYBODY*. For example, in Iraq we have Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Afghanistan is mostly Sunni, with Shia being most of what's left. In any case, some are willing to deal, some are hostile, etc...
Sure, but it just shows you're a big hypocrite. If you really respected them, you'd leave them the fuck alone. How'd you like it if someone came and invaded you to "liberate" you? Personally, as an American myself, I think we'd be better off under foreign rule because we obviously have no business governing ourselves; our government is even more corrupt than Mexico's.
2. Guns Blasting - If we were really acting like that; we'd have killed everybody by now. War is, by it's nature, a dirty affair, and mistakes get innocents killed. Insurgencies are even dirtier.
So it's ok to kill innocents? I won't feel sorry for your family if they get killed because some other country wants control of natural resources in your country.
3. What policies are we pushing in Afghanistan? Iraq is debatable, but in Afghanistan it's pretty much 'don't engage in or support terrorist acts; especially against the USA'.
Bullshit. AQ was demolished in the first few months of the Afghanistan campaign. The rest has been all about taking control of the country by setting up a thoroughly corrupt puppet government so that US corporations can get access to the natural resources there.
I'm a little confused; why would your most left-wing party want to privatize everything? Usually, it's the right-wingers that want to privatize everything.
The far extreme of the left-wing is socialism, where basically the government is as big as possible, and provides as many services as possible, and nothing is privatized. The government is supposed to take care of everyone. The far extreme of the right-wing is fascism, also called "crony capitalism", where the government and corporations are tied together so that the corporations control the government and drain money from the public through taxes which are then given to the corporations with things like no-bid contracts, bailouts, etc.
The right-wingers here in the USA (which are the Democrats and the Republicans; the Rs are slightly more right-wing than the Ds) are always trying to privatize everything; they want to get rid of the postal system so private companies don't have to compete with it, they've been privatizing the prisons (they're run by corporations like Wackenhut and Corrections Corp. of America), they've even been privatizing the military by hiring mercenaries (they call them "private security contractors").
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I'm not disagreeing that you can't get good American beer. I'll also agree that the situation is entirely different than it was 25 years ago, when all the nice microbrews weren't available. However, as you said, quantities matter, and these microbrews are still just that: small volume, and the shitbrews are still much higher selling by far.
I don't think it's like Japanese vs. American either; it's getting closer to that, I'll grant you, but it's more like $100k cars vs. everything else; I see $100k+ cars fairly frequently in my city (Phoenix, esp. in the Scottsdale area); Lamborghinis, Aston Martins, Ferraris, Maseratis, Rollses, even a Tesla or two, etc. But the $15-30k cars are still by far the most common, of newer cars I see driving around.
So I don't think it's unfair to continue to make fun of "American beers". Most American beer, by volume, is crap, and most Americans like crappy beer (which is why they can sell that volume of it). When the shitbrews are out of business or have changed so they're not so horrible, then we can say "American beers" shouldn't be bashed any more, but it hasn't happened yet. It might one day; after all, whatever you may think of Ford cars today, they really aren't like the Pintos any more.
That's great and all, but when you're at some stupid company with a stupid policy that forbids using it, that's not much help.
It's not much different on Linux. I set my wife up with Kubuntu on her laptop, and again the Konsole program is several layers deep (K -> Applications -> System -> Konsole). Of course, I have an icon on my bottom panel on my systems, but she never uses it so there's no shortcut on hers. She gets along just fine without it.
I've used both rpm and dpkg-based systems since the late 90s, and I've never ever had a package database impode, or really even heard of it happening.
Yes, unfortunately we Americans are way behind the times, as usual. Is it only France that has chips in cards or is it Europe wide?
Ok, if USB keyboards and mice are OK, then how do you keep people from plugging in USB thumb drives? What about the contention above that USB ports are not allowed to be accessible? That's pretty hard to do with a USB keyboard or mouse.
Also, if you want to convert desalination outflow to usable table salt you have to clean it first. Economically undesirable in most cases. (But not all)
Why would that be? There's already lots of places where ocean water is evaporated into sea salt, to be used for human consumption. Why not just use desalination outflow for that and kill two birds with one stone?
Desalination, as a solution to fresh water needs, is expenSive, complicated and (generally) damaging. It is a "big problem". However, societies generally overlook big problems when they find a way to get things that they want (more). See: fracking.
Ok, but what's the alternative? If you have too many people in a place where there isn't enough freshwater to support them, what else are you going to do? No, executing excess population is not a viable solution.
Fracking is slightly different; people don't absolutely require petroleum products for life; there's other energy sources available, we're just too cheap and lazy to develop those. But people can't survive without freshwater.
No, it'll probably drive down the price of sea salt.
BTW, sea salt is great stuff; it tastes much better than table salt (mainly because of the other constituent elements like calcium and magnesium).
Oh please. For one thing, we already have desalination plants in some places dumping brine back into the sea; obviously it's not a big problem. There's a lot of water in the oceans. Secondly, the highly concentrated brine from these graphene filters could potentially be valuable for harvesting sea salt. We already have giant sea salt plants, where basically ocean water is left to dry out so we can take the salt out; between humans taking sea salt and leaving the water, and taking water and leaving the salt, I don't think there's any net effect on the oceans. And these graphene filters could make sea salt harvesting potentially more efficient.
Ok, the explanation about RR makes perfect sense; I didn't realize they were separated but with the same name, much like Volvo (the car company is owned by Gealy of China, the heavy equipment company is entirely separate and still Swedish).
However, this still doesn't explain Jaguar.
I totally agree about privatization. We have the same problem here in the US; there's a handful of "too big to fail" banks, and when they were on the verge of failing, the government rushed in and bailed them out, but they get to keep all their profits. So in my view, the government has two responsibilities: 1) to own and manage any service that's essential and too important to fail, and which can't be reasonably done with competitive private companies (e.g., municipal water and sewer is a prime example of this, as are roads), and 2) for anything that's essential but can be done well with competing companies, the government needs to regulate them and make sure they don't merge into too few, too large companies which are then "too big to fail". If a private company is too important to fail, it shouldn't exist in the first place, that function should be done by a much larger number of smaller companies. Banking (not central banking, just the rest of it) is a good example of this; there should be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of banks, not a small handful that constitute a cartel.
Unfortunately, my views on this are extremely unpopular in the USA these days.
Um, I think you might have replied to the wrong post. I was merely pointing out how government requirements aren't always grounded in reality. Not allowing USB keyboards and mice would definitely be an example of this, because it's getting pretty hard to find a new PC these days that still uses PS/2. Another great example is the State of California's requirement a while ago (I think it got changed before it went into effect because of the uproar over how stupid it was) that devices procured by the state government not use gendered terms like "male" and "female", even though just about every electrical connector on the planet uses these terms out of necessity.
In short, it seems quite clear that the Neo devs are deliberately doing the absolute bare minimum to satisfy the GPL requirements (and to be able to use a ".org" domain, which may have significant tax implications)
I'm not an expert on domain names, but I'm pretty sure that anyone can get a .org domain if they want, and I don't think there's any requirements about being a non-profit nor are there any tax implications involved. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. My first employer out of college, a small 50-person company, had (and still has) a .org domain for their website, probably because the equivalent .com was already taken. This was way back in the late 90s too. As far as I can tell, at least in the last 15 years, there's been no real policing of domain names so that only non-profits and the like can get .orgs, even though it seems fairly obvious that this was the original intention. It's too bad, though, since I think it was a good idea, but the whole domain-name system is screwed to hell these days, not only with .com, .org, and .net all being interchangeable, then later with stupid extensions like .biz and .info, and now with total anarchy with any extension at all being allowed.
Actually, that's not such a bad idea I think. Lots of businesses operate entirely on the principle of taking advantage of peoples' ignorance or laziness or impatience; they provide a service so that if you're too lazy to do it yourself or don't have the time, they do it for you, but they're not stopping you from just doing it yourself. Too many businesses (like computer games back in the days when they had things like manual checks) try too hard to make it impossible for anyone to get around their toll gate, and end up spending so many resources in this pursuit that it hurts theor profitability or even ruins them, when they'd be better off just putting their product out there, ignoring the people who have more time than money and find ways around paying the "toll", and just focusing on the customers who DO pay and have better things to do than figure out ways of not paying, and making those people happy.
Stupid Slashdot again; they can spend lots of time revamping the UI, but they can't fix the broken moderation system after more than a decade. The lack of a "-1, Incorrect" moderation option has been a glaring error forever here.
This "official binaries" business is really perplexing IMO. Why would anyone want "official" binaries at all? In Linux-land, none of the distros ship binaries built by third parties, except for the few instances where they don't have a choice (Adobe Flash, etc.). For open-source software they distribute, they always maintain the source and build it themselves so that it's built for the right machine type/arch, uses the compiler they've selected, links properly to all the dependency libraries, etc.
I just don't see how this is any incentive at all. If it's going to be included with Linux distros in their repositories, the distros will build it themselves and that's what you'll be installing when you type "sudo apt-get install program"; however if the company makes it so the software isn't included with distros' respositories, it probably isn't going to become very popular.
The funny thing is, I can see why many of those really should be privatized (or shouldn't have even been government-controlled to begin with). Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.) Or an airline, or a steel company, or an aerospace company? However, gas (assuming this is the company that supplies natural gas for home heating) and water utilities IMO absolutely should be government-run, because those are essential utility services that citizens in a civilization need to survive in modern times, and they're not something where you can easily have competition (what are you going to do, install 10 independent sewer systems under the city so people can choose amongst them?). I can also see a good case for the telecom company being nationalized, or at least the company that owns and operates the "last mile" infrastructure that connects to everyone's homes.
Either you're full of shit, or things are much worse in other developed countries than I suspected. The US government is completely corrupt, it's just not noticeable at the local level (e.g., regular people don't have to bribe cops on a daily basis), but at the Federal level, it's completely obvious. What kind of country allows corporations to legally blatantly bribe politicians and buy their votes? You don't think that's corrupt?
Finally, ranking a country based on how its people perceive its level of corruption isn't exactly flawless methodology. Americans are so brainwashed that they really think corporations should be able to buy off politicians, so of course they're going to perceive the corruption as low.
Well for starters, when you say "use Gmail", that generally implies using the web interface, since that's what 99.9% of Gmail users do.
But secondly, I see some problems with using another email client, namely Gmail's use of tags (and also nested tags) and conversation views, which other clients may not support. The tags and the conversation views are two giant reasons to use Gmail in the first place, at least IMO.
You sound like a real piece of shit.
That's a little different. The UK and the US have a "special relationship": UK is the US's bitch, so if you're in the UK, you need to follow US law as it applies to you there. The student might as well have been in the US. It's not quite the same as being in the US of course (after all, they haven't extradited Assange from there yet, but maybe they didn't want to try because of the publicity), but it's pretty close.
But that's a unique situation; with any other country, you should be safe. Just look at the Kim Dotcom case; the US prosecutors got totally slapped down on that one; NZ didn't go fully along with them. So, as I said, if you're in a country like Latvia, you obviously have nothing to worry about from the US MAFIAA.
Stupid Slashdot with no way to edit posts like Reddit; I meant to say "Afghanistan and Iraq" at the end there.
Are you really that stupid? You're there to push imperialism and help American corporations profit. The American government is the one that's evil; who's going to protect us from them?
At least South Korea has some real basis in keeping the peace, but that was done over 50 years ago, before the American government was as corrupt as it is now. All the campaigns after that, especially the ones in the last 10 years, haven't been about "keeping the peace" at all. You don't invade a country to "keep the peace": we didn't invade Korea, they had already been invaded, just like we didn't invade France, as they had already been invaded. But we certainly did invade Afghanistan and Iran.
1. Respecting *SOME* of a regions customs and curtesies helps prevent you from making enemies of *EVERYBODY*. For example, in Iraq we have Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Afghanistan is mostly Sunni, with Shia being most of what's left. In any case, some are willing to deal, some are hostile, etc...
Sure, but it just shows you're a big hypocrite. If you really respected them, you'd leave them the fuck alone. How'd you like it if someone came and invaded you to "liberate" you? Personally, as an American myself, I think we'd be better off under foreign rule because we obviously have no business governing ourselves; our government is even more corrupt than Mexico's.
2. Guns Blasting - If we were really acting like that; we'd have killed everybody by now. War is, by it's nature, a dirty affair, and mistakes get innocents killed. Insurgencies are even dirtier.
So it's ok to kill innocents? I won't feel sorry for your family if they get killed because some other country wants control of natural resources in your country.
3. What policies are we pushing in Afghanistan? Iraq is debatable, but in Afghanistan it's pretty much 'don't engage in or support terrorist acts; especially against the USA'.
Bullshit. AQ was demolished in the first few months of the Afghanistan campaign. The rest has been all about taking control of the country by setting up a thoroughly corrupt puppet government so that US corporations can get access to the natural resources there.
No, they're not the result of outright war, they're mostly the result of the threat of war and bullying.
I'm a little confused; why would your most left-wing party want to privatize everything? Usually, it's the right-wingers that want to privatize everything.
The far extreme of the left-wing is socialism, where basically the government is as big as possible, and provides as many services as possible, and nothing is privatized. The government is supposed to take care of everyone. The far extreme of the right-wing is fascism, also called "crony capitalism", where the government and corporations are tied together so that the corporations control the government and drain money from the public through taxes which are then given to the corporations with things like no-bid contracts, bailouts, etc.
The right-wingers here in the USA (which are the Democrats and the Republicans; the Rs are slightly more right-wing than the Ds) are always trying to privatize everything; they want to get rid of the postal system so private companies don't have to compete with it, they've been privatizing the prisons (they're run by corporations like Wackenhut and Corrections Corp. of America), they've even been privatizing the military by hiring mercenaries (they call them "private security contractors").