Especially in medicine, hospital systems are going to have to rethink their networks. It really can't be a standard Windows business-class 'works most of the time to some degree' type thing.
Exactly. They brought this on themselves by using Windows. The IT director should be fired.
Ok, I never heard the more detailed version of this. But still, the post I was responding to completely left out these rather important two facts, and made it out that he was someone like Mickey Mantel, who ruined his liver with alcoholism and had to get a transplant, not that the liver problem was a complication from pancreatic cancer (likely compounded by wasting time with holistic fuckery), which wasn't his fault at all (aside from the holistic time-wasting).
Right, because that isn't an approved device right now. My point is, however, that because of this stuff, they likely wouldn't even be considered in the case they wanted to change IT vendors. And given the absolutely enormous size of this particular organization, that's a huge amount of business they're missing out on.
but in fairness: no major-brand, professional laptop has had VGA or DVI outputs for awhile. HDMI and [mini-]DisplayPort for sure, but not the pinned ones. Both VGA and DVI are too thick. Most professional laptops have also dumped the ethernet port for the same reason.
What are you talking about? My Dell E6420 isn't *that* old, and has both VGA and Ethernet (and HDMI). My HP laptop at work is about a year old, and also has these same ports. You can't have a professional laptop without Ethernet. Where I work, there is NO wifi at all, for security reasons. Ethernet is the only thing allowed.
For example, the Surface product line has gotten along just fine without HDMI, VGA, or DVI. They expect you to use a dongle, which is itself fine.
That's fine I guess for a consumer product, not a professional laptop. I'm not going to carry around dongles just so I can use the conference room systems at work. And I don't have to, because they're smart enough to buy laptops with a full complement of ports.
Most importantly though? I use ESC without looking and I also use function keys regularly throughout the course of the day: keyboard brightness (up/down), play/pause, and volume (up/down/mute). Now, not only do I get no haptic feedback when I use them, like Surface's failed TouchCover, but they're context aware, which means that they won't always be there!
Yeah, that's really lame. But to be fair, a lot of consumer laptops got rid of the dedicated volume/mute keys ages ago too, just to save money. You're supposed to change volume in software I guess. Business laptops still have these though. So again, Apple shows the new MBP isn't a real business laptop. And not having an Escape key is an outright deal-breaker and makes the machine completely unusable.
On my desk right now is a 2015 Macbook Pro. Not a single USB device plugged in but I do use them now and then. In fact I have a 4 port USB hub sitting next to it, that I used to use but no longer do. Every morning I plug in my power cord, second display, and thunderbolt to ethernet adaptor (which has the ethernet cable plugged in the other end). If i had a new Macbook Pro, every morning I'd plug in my power cord, my 2nd display, and a $20 USB-C to gigabit ethernet/USB-A hub. That would give me everything I have today without any extra effort or dongles.
That's not a professional computer by any stretch. A *real* professional computer would have a docking station. Real companies buy laptops from the same vendor so they can put the same docking station everywhere, including conference rooms, and not mess around with tons of cables and adapters.
It's amazing how clueless Apple zealots are about what serious business IT environments look like.
You forgot the argument about pro-level cameras making 50MB RAW files, and how long this will take to transfer wirelessly when you shoot 1000 pictures in one night.
The solution is simple: you just need to stop using RAW, and set the camera to record in a low-resolution JPEG format; that way, wireless transfer will be pretty quick. It takes a courageous company like Apple to make professional photographers realize they're being silly by using these ultra-high-resolution image formats instead of a more convenient, highly compressed JPEG format in low resolution.
Don't worry, "macs4all" will be here filling the comment section with rebuttals to everyone's anti-Apple comments and telling us how Apple can do no wrong.
WTF are you talking about? I'm no Apple fan, but Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, not liver failure. It was rather sudden, which isn't abnormal with pancreatic cancer as it can be extremely aggressive. You must be thinking of someone else.
Jobs' only fault (AFAIK) was in delaying proper medical treatment because he was exploring some BS herbal or "holistic" therapy or something. By the time he gave up on that, it was too late. If he had gone for conventional therapy right away, he might still be alive. There's a fair number of people who die from treatable cancer every year because of "alternative" medicine like this.
That's because that's what makes a laptop a professional model: a bunch of parts that you may or may not ever use.
Any real business laptop these days has an HDMI or DisplayPort output, and probably even a VGA output, because conference room monitors use those connectors. You can't go to some customer site, where you don't know exactly what their conference room has (and they probably don't either, off the tops of their heads), and then bitch at them for not having some brand-new USB-c connection or not having an adapter for your laptop.
Real business laptops have Ethernet jacks, because many businesses (and governments especially) require them for security purposes. How exactly do you think you'd ever use a MacBook with no Ethernet on a secure government network? You wouldn't; those networks are NOT wireless.
A "professional" laptop is not going to require you to carry around a bunch of adapters for all the circumstances you might find yourself in and not anticipate beforehand. This is why *real* pro laptops have all these ports, even if it does make them slightly bigger and heavier. For cheap-ass consumer-grade computers, leaving out stuff that's not used as much may be just fine, but that doesn't work for serious business and professional users.
This guy is an obvious s(c)hill. I haven't seen many SDcard slots on laptop computers that stick out when there's no card in it. On my Dells, they usually have a little plastic insert to keep dirt out, the slot is spring-loaded, and that plastic insert sits completely flush. Only if you have an actual SDcard in there does something stick out, but that's not a problem because normally you don't leave the cards in there very long, only for when you need to transfer stuff, then you put them back in the camera or whatever.
And yeah, expecting people to just use wireless transfer is indeed idiotic, especially given the gargantuan image sizes that modern mega-megapixel cameras create.
Now, using a USB card reader could be a workaround. I have one of those lying around in case I ever need to read a CF card again (not likely), or my SD slot were to fail, or if I needed to read a Sony MemoryStick (not likely at all). But wait! There's no USB-A slot on this shitty new MacBook! So I'd have to go buy some kind of hub or adapter, or buy an all-new USB-C card reader.
This new MacBook is just a giant failure in every way. It'll be interesting to see how the sales for it fare; will the Apple faithful buy it anyway and delude themselves into thinking it's wonderful even though it's a big step down? I wouldn't be surprised.
Because there's a non-zero probability that they'll rob you. It happened to a guy I know: hitchhiker held a knife to his throat.
Sure, the probability is probably small, but you never know, and desperately poor people are known to take desperate measures. And I don't feel like carrying a gun around for cases like this (not only that, a gun is a terrible weapon in such close-quarters combat where the attacker is likely behind you or maybe beside you; the attacker is more likely to get the gun away from you and use it on you; maybe if our drivers' seats were on the right instead of the left it'd be a little different but not much).
I used to bag groceries when I was in high school, and back then the bagger would bring the groceries to your car for you and load them. They were frequently tipped, but not much.
We didn't have very many black people, so I didn't worry about them not tipping (there was one ghetto-looking family that for some reason felt entitled to park in the fire lane instead of getting a parking space like everyone else). However, I did learn to discriminate against people based on how many groceries they bought. I found that invariably, the people who bought so much stuff that it took 2 full carts would NEVER tip. Worse, these people usually expected me to push *both* carts at once! So I always tried to skip out on these jerks. People who bought 3 carts' worth of stuff, however, were good tippers, so it was important to be able to judge just how many carts of groceries they had bought. Also, old people were shitty tippers; they'd have expensive Cadillacs and give you a lecture about not slamming the trunk shut because it's auto-closing, but then get in their car and start it up and let you breathe fumes while loading the trunk. Middle-aged people with decent cars were the best tippers, frequently not getting that much stuff but still tipping the most (except maybe for the rare 3-cart shopper).
Unfortunately, it is true about black people and tipping: they're notoriously bad about it.
Notice the message immediately above yours, where the poster states that he uses a handle for Uber, rather than his real name. You can do this just about anywhere; no one is forcing you to use your birth name, except for things like financial documents of course.
So what this study is showing that if you have a stupid-sounding name and are also too stupid to go by an alias that people can easily read and pronounce, you're more likely to have trouble in life.
Most people don't name themselves. I suggest either not giving out names or allowing pseudo-names.
This is wrong. People DO name themselves. Go set up an Uber or Lyft account, and tell me how exactly they figure out what your name is. They don't; they rely on you to enter it in. You can put whatever you want there: you can use your real name, or you can call yourself Mickey Mouse if you want. No one is forcing you to use your birth name.
I use a pseudo-name at burger joints because they mispronounce my actual name so badly that sometimes I don't recognize it
I'm guessing Paterson was named after the city in New Jersey, and is probably black.
Chandra sounds like a black name.
Cornelius is probably black. White people haven't used that name in a century or more.
Felix Kumi is probably something non-white. I haven't heard of a white person named Felix in many decades, and Kumi isn't a white-sounding surname.
Keith McLeod sounds like he's of Irish or Scottish descent; it's pretty close to Connor MacLeod, of the clan MacLeod....
Rayshaun is definitely a black name. I've heard of it.
Junior is a Southern white nickname for boys named after their father; instead of William Smith, Jr., they just call him "Junior". Then when he has a son, he named him William Smith III, but his nickname is "Trip" (short for triple). White Southerners have some really weird traditions. "Junior Prosper" I'm guessing is black based on the funny last name, and my assumption that they actually named him "Junior" on his birth certificate (or else the police report would use his proper, full name and not a nickname).
You're missing the OP's point, which is that this is an example of the Streisand Effect. Many people may not be that actively interested in reading scientific papers, but then they read articles like this about Elsevier going after these "pirates", and look into the issue, decide that Elsevier's actions and monopolization of the industry are abhorrent, so they go to the pirate sites and start reading, then they tell their friends all about it, and it snowballs.
We've seen this over and over and over on the internet: when some powerful interest wants to shut something down they don't like, it just brings attention to it and makes it even more popular.
It's not just black people doing silly crap like this. All the lower-to-middle class white people are doing stupid shit with their kids' names too. They'll take some normal name, and then come up with some idiotic misspelling of it. "Britney" is an old example of this (misspelling of "Brittany"). Or they'll make up some dumb name that sorta resembles normal names; I knew of a guy (now probably late 20s) named "Donathan", for instance.
For some odd reason, we're now in an era where everyone thinks their child is a special snowflake and is entitled to a completely unique name, instead of just picking some normal name that people have already heard of and know how to pronounce and spell.
Go talk to black people in NYC and ask them what it's been like trying to hail a cab on the street. They regularly get passed by, because drivers assume they'll want to go to the Bronx or something, even though they may live in the Upper West Side. Black people like that prefer Uber/Lyft because now their destination is shown to the driver before the driver accepts the fare, and they have much better success getting rides. The ones going to the Bronx may still have trouble, but it's still a preferable situation to using the regular cabs where they're discriminated against based solely on skin color, instead of where they're actually going.
So please explain why this "regulation" is such a good thing anyway, when it does nothing to prevent taxi drivers from passing by black people on the street.
"John" is indeed slang for toilet, just like "Johnson" is slang for male anatomy. But slang comes and goes. People from younger generations may not recognize slang words that have passed out of popular usage, or were never used much in their region. A lot of young people probably wouldn't get the "Johnson" reference now. "Head" is also a slang word for toilet, but it's mainly only heard among Navy people and others involved in marine industries. Other people usually have never heard this.
However, "latrine" is not slang for toilet at all, it's actually the correct word, and comes from French, and goes back many generations at least.
So there is a big difference. No one is naming their kid "toilet" AFAIK.
I'd like to point out that there's absolutely nothing forcing you to keep your given name. You can call yourself whatever you want.
It's pretty easy to legally change your name. My ex-wife did it after we got married; many women still do these days, to take their husband's last name. But while you're filing the name-change request, there's nothing stopping you from writing in a different first name. That's exactly what she did: she hated her first name that her mother had given her. So she found a totally different name that she liked and changed both names in one go.
But you don't even have to bother with going to court if you don't want to: she started calling herself by my last name for some time before going through the legal motions. It's not like places are going to ask to see your birth certificate. It's really quite trivial to just go by an alias.
So I'm not saying it's OK to be prejudiced against people for their dumb names, but there's really nothing stopping them from changing those dumb names if they want.
Well for starters, Ebay has a buyer-review system so that buyers can review and rate sellers. If a seller sucks, people are going to complain and give them terrible ratings, which immediately show up when you look at a listing. Amazon has a similar but crappy system that doesn't work remotely as well, and is set up to allow sellers to offer incentives to people to change their reviews.
I'm not willing to pay any extra for vetting. It should be free. I don't pay extra for "vetting" when I buy something sold by Amazon and shipped out of an Amazon warehouse, so why should I pay extra for something they sell from a 3rd party but don't make entirely obvious that it's coming from a 3rd party?
If Amazon wants to open their platform to 3rd parties, it's their responsibility to vet those sellers. Ebay *only* sells through 3rd parties, but at least they put some real effort into rating those sellers and policing them when there's a problem. Amazon is set up to confuse you about who's selling an item and where it's coming from.
Amazon's really gone down the tubes in the last few years AFAICT. I've shifted a lot of my buying over to Ebay actually; I get better deals, especially if I only need one thing that doesn't cost over $50, since Amazon has high shipping fees if you don't buy enough to pass that threshold for free shipping. I still get some stuff on there, but I have to be really careful, whereas with Ebay I can look at a seller's reputation easily and buy only from sellers with stellar reputations. Amazon really doesn't have such a system, and you frequently don't know who's selling something, and you'll have no idea where it's being sent from except by looking at the projected shipping time. With Ebay, I can easily eliminate all the Chinese sellers by clicking "US only" or "North America only".
I agree completely. This is 100% Amazon's fault. But I do disagree about buying computer parts; I get mine from Ebay. I can easily get off-lease high-end business-class laptops on there for dirt-cheap prices, plus tons of spare parts. Amazon has typically been where I went to get other stuff, like housewares, music CDs (sorry, I think buying music in MP3 format is dumb), a guitar amp, etc. But more and more, I'm finding Ebay is the better place to get stuff. It's even better for buying cheap Chinese stuff; if I'm willing to wait that long, I can look for a seller with a decent reputation and I know what I'm signing up for.
Oh, I should add: after I gave it to her and got her set up, I haven't had to go over to help her with it any more. Maybe I should have set her up with Windows instead, so I'd have an excuse to be over there every other day....
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Especially in medicine, hospital systems are going to have to rethink their networks. It really can't be a standard Windows business-class 'works most of the time to some degree' type thing.
Exactly. They brought this on themselves by using Windows. The IT director should be fired.
Ok, I never heard the more detailed version of this. But still, the post I was responding to completely left out these rather important two facts, and made it out that he was someone like Mickey Mantel, who ruined his liver with alcoholism and had to get a transplant, not that the liver problem was a complication from pancreatic cancer (likely compounded by wasting time with holistic fuckery), which wasn't his fault at all (aside from the holistic time-wasting).
Right, because that isn't an approved device right now. My point is, however, that because of this stuff, they likely wouldn't even be considered in the case they wanted to change IT vendors. And given the absolutely enormous size of this particular organization, that's a huge amount of business they're missing out on.
but in fairness: no major-brand, professional laptop has had VGA or DVI outputs for awhile. HDMI and [mini-]DisplayPort for sure, but not the pinned ones. Both VGA and DVI are too thick. Most professional laptops have also dumped the ethernet port for the same reason.
What are you talking about? My Dell E6420 isn't *that* old, and has both VGA and Ethernet (and HDMI). My HP laptop at work is about a year old, and also has these same ports. You can't have a professional laptop without Ethernet. Where I work, there is NO wifi at all, for security reasons. Ethernet is the only thing allowed.
For example, the Surface product line has gotten along just fine without HDMI, VGA, or DVI. They expect you to use a dongle, which is itself fine.
That's fine I guess for a consumer product, not a professional laptop. I'm not going to carry around dongles just so I can use the conference room systems at work. And I don't have to, because they're smart enough to buy laptops with a full complement of ports.
Most importantly though? I use ESC without looking and I also use function keys regularly throughout the course of the day: keyboard brightness (up/down), play/pause, and volume (up/down/mute). Now, not only do I get no haptic feedback when I use them, like Surface's failed TouchCover, but they're context aware, which means that they won't always be there!
Yeah, that's really lame. But to be fair, a lot of consumer laptops got rid of the dedicated volume/mute keys ages ago too, just to save money. You're supposed to change volume in software I guess. Business laptops still have these though. So again, Apple shows the new MBP isn't a real business laptop. And not having an Escape key is an outright deal-breaker and makes the machine completely unusable.
On my desk right now is a 2015 Macbook Pro. Not a single USB device plugged in but I do use them now and then. In fact I have a 4 port USB hub sitting next to it, that I used to use but no longer do. Every morning I plug in my power cord, second display, and thunderbolt to ethernet adaptor (which has the ethernet cable plugged in the other end). If i had a new Macbook Pro, every morning I'd plug in my power cord, my 2nd display, and a $20 USB-C to gigabit ethernet/USB-A hub. That would give me everything I have today without any extra effort or dongles.
That's not a professional computer by any stretch. A *real* professional computer would have a docking station. Real companies buy laptops from the same vendor so they can put the same docking station everywhere, including conference rooms, and not mess around with tons of cables and adapters.
It's amazing how clueless Apple zealots are about what serious business IT environments look like.
You forgot the argument about pro-level cameras making 50MB RAW files, and how long this will take to transfer wirelessly when you shoot 1000 pictures in one night.
The solution is simple: you just need to stop using RAW, and set the camera to record in a low-resolution JPEG format; that way, wireless transfer will be pretty quick. It takes a courageous company like Apple to make professional photographers realize they're being silly by using these ultra-high-resolution image formats instead of a more convenient, highly compressed JPEG format in low resolution.
Don't worry, "macs4all" will be here filling the comment section with rebuttals to everyone's anti-Apple comments and telling us how Apple can do no wrong.
WTF are you talking about? I'm no Apple fan, but Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, not liver failure. It was rather sudden, which isn't abnormal with pancreatic cancer as it can be extremely aggressive. You must be thinking of someone else.
Jobs' only fault (AFAIK) was in delaying proper medical treatment because he was exploring some BS herbal or "holistic" therapy or something. By the time he gave up on that, it was too late. If he had gone for conventional therapy right away, he might still be alive. There's a fair number of people who die from treatable cancer every year because of "alternative" medicine like this.
That's because that's what makes a laptop a professional model: a bunch of parts that you may or may not ever use.
Any real business laptop these days has an HDMI or DisplayPort output, and probably even a VGA output, because conference room monitors use those connectors. You can't go to some customer site, where you don't know exactly what their conference room has (and they probably don't either, off the tops of their heads), and then bitch at them for not having some brand-new USB-c connection or not having an adapter for your laptop.
Real business laptops have Ethernet jacks, because many businesses (and governments especially) require them for security purposes. How exactly do you think you'd ever use a MacBook with no Ethernet on a secure government network? You wouldn't; those networks are NOT wireless.
A "professional" laptop is not going to require you to carry around a bunch of adapters for all the circumstances you might find yourself in and not anticipate beforehand. This is why *real* pro laptops have all these ports, even if it does make them slightly bigger and heavier. For cheap-ass consumer-grade computers, leaving out stuff that's not used as much may be just fine, but that doesn't work for serious business and professional users.
This guy is an obvious s(c)hill. I haven't seen many SDcard slots on laptop computers that stick out when there's no card in it. On my Dells, they usually have a little plastic insert to keep dirt out, the slot is spring-loaded, and that plastic insert sits completely flush. Only if you have an actual SDcard in there does something stick out, but that's not a problem because normally you don't leave the cards in there very long, only for when you need to transfer stuff, then you put them back in the camera or whatever.
And yeah, expecting people to just use wireless transfer is indeed idiotic, especially given the gargantuan image sizes that modern mega-megapixel cameras create.
Now, using a USB card reader could be a workaround. I have one of those lying around in case I ever need to read a CF card again (not likely), or my SD slot were to fail, or if I needed to read a Sony MemoryStick (not likely at all). But wait! There's no USB-A slot on this shitty new MacBook! So I'd have to go buy some kind of hub or adapter, or buy an all-new USB-C card reader.
This new MacBook is just a giant failure in every way. It'll be interesting to see how the sales for it fare; will the Apple faithful buy it anyway and delude themselves into thinking it's wonderful even though it's a big step down? I wouldn't be surprised.
If I have a son, I'm naming him Ragnar.
Or maybe Thor.
Because there's a non-zero probability that they'll rob you. It happened to a guy I know: hitchhiker held a knife to his throat.
Sure, the probability is probably small, but you never know, and desperately poor people are known to take desperate measures. And I don't feel like carrying a gun around for cases like this (not only that, a gun is a terrible weapon in such close-quarters combat where the attacker is likely behind you or maybe beside you; the attacker is more likely to get the gun away from you and use it on you; maybe if our drivers' seats were on the right instead of the left it'd be a little different but not much).
I used to bag groceries when I was in high school, and back then the bagger would bring the groceries to your car for you and load them. They were frequently tipped, but not much.
We didn't have very many black people, so I didn't worry about them not tipping (there was one ghetto-looking family that for some reason felt entitled to park in the fire lane instead of getting a parking space like everyone else). However, I did learn to discriminate against people based on how many groceries they bought. I found that invariably, the people who bought so much stuff that it took 2 full carts would NEVER tip. Worse, these people usually expected me to push *both* carts at once! So I always tried to skip out on these jerks. People who bought 3 carts' worth of stuff, however, were good tippers, so it was important to be able to judge just how many carts of groceries they had bought. Also, old people were shitty tippers; they'd have expensive Cadillacs and give you a lecture about not slamming the trunk shut because it's auto-closing, but then get in their car and start it up and let you breathe fumes while loading the trunk. Middle-aged people with decent cars were the best tippers, frequently not getting that much stuff but still tipping the most (except maybe for the rare 3-cart shopper).
Unfortunately, it is true about black people and tipping: they're notoriously bad about it.
Notice the message immediately above yours, where the poster states that he uses a handle for Uber, rather than his real name. You can do this just about anywhere; no one is forcing you to use your birth name, except for things like financial documents of course.
So what this study is showing that if you have a stupid-sounding name and are also too stupid to go by an alias that people can easily read and pronounce, you're more likely to have trouble in life.
Most people don't name themselves.
I suggest either not giving out names or allowing pseudo-names.
This is wrong. People DO name themselves. Go set up an Uber or Lyft account, and tell me how exactly they figure out what your name is. They don't; they rely on you to enter it in. You can put whatever you want there: you can use your real name, or you can call yourself Mickey Mouse if you want. No one is forcing you to use your birth name.
I use a pseudo-name at burger joints because they mispronounce my actual name so badly that sometimes I don't recognize it
See? You already do this yourself.
Tyree isn't a black name, it's from the planet Neural..
I'm guessing Paterson was named after the city in New Jersey, and is probably black.
Chandra sounds like a black name.
Cornelius is probably black. White people haven't used that name in a century or more.
Felix Kumi is probably something non-white. I haven't heard of a white person named Felix in many decades, and Kumi isn't a white-sounding surname.
Keith McLeod sounds like he's of Irish or Scottish descent; it's pretty close to Connor MacLeod, of the clan MacLeod....
Rayshaun is definitely a black name. I've heard of it.
Junior is a Southern white nickname for boys named after their father; instead of William Smith, Jr., they just call him "Junior". Then when he has a son, he named him William Smith III, but his nickname is "Trip" (short for triple). White Southerners have some really weird traditions. "Junior Prosper" I'm guessing is black based on the funny last name, and my assumption that they actually named him "Junior" on his birth certificate (or else the police report would use his proper, full name and not a nickname).
You're missing the OP's point, which is that this is an example of the Streisand Effect. Many people may not be that actively interested in reading scientific papers, but then they read articles like this about Elsevier going after these "pirates", and look into the issue, decide that Elsevier's actions and monopolization of the industry are abhorrent, so they go to the pirate sites and start reading, then they tell their friends all about it, and it snowballs.
We've seen this over and over and over on the internet: when some powerful interest wants to shut something down they don't like, it just brings attention to it and makes it even more popular.
It's not just black people doing silly crap like this. All the lower-to-middle class white people are doing stupid shit with their kids' names too. They'll take some normal name, and then come up with some idiotic misspelling of it. "Britney" is an old example of this (misspelling of "Brittany"). Or they'll make up some dumb name that sorta resembles normal names; I knew of a guy (now probably late 20s) named "Donathan", for instance.
For some odd reason, we're now in an era where everyone thinks their child is a special snowflake and is entitled to a completely unique name, instead of just picking some normal name that people have already heard of and know how to pronounce and spell.
Absolutely wrong.
Go talk to black people in NYC and ask them what it's been like trying to hail a cab on the street. They regularly get passed by, because drivers assume they'll want to go to the Bronx or something, even though they may live in the Upper West Side. Black people like that prefer Uber/Lyft because now their destination is shown to the driver before the driver accepts the fare, and they have much better success getting rides. The ones going to the Bronx may still have trouble, but it's still a preferable situation to using the regular cabs where they're discriminated against based solely on skin color, instead of where they're actually going.
So please explain why this "regulation" is such a good thing anyway, when it does nothing to prevent taxi drivers from passing by black people on the street.
"John" is indeed slang for toilet, just like "Johnson" is slang for male anatomy. But slang comes and goes. People from younger generations may not recognize slang words that have passed out of popular usage, or were never used much in their region. A lot of young people probably wouldn't get the "Johnson" reference now. "Head" is also a slang word for toilet, but it's mainly only heard among Navy people and others involved in marine industries. Other people usually have never heard this.
However, "latrine" is not slang for toilet at all, it's actually the correct word, and comes from French, and goes back many generations at least.
So there is a big difference. No one is naming their kid "toilet" AFAIK.
I'd like to point out that there's absolutely nothing forcing you to keep your given name. You can call yourself whatever you want.
It's pretty easy to legally change your name. My ex-wife did it after we got married; many women still do these days, to take their husband's last name. But while you're filing the name-change request, there's nothing stopping you from writing in a different first name. That's exactly what she did: she hated her first name that her mother had given her. So she found a totally different name that she liked and changed both names in one go.
But you don't even have to bother with going to court if you don't want to: she started calling herself by my last name for some time before going through the legal motions. It's not like places are going to ask to see your birth certificate. It's really quite trivial to just go by an alias.
So I'm not saying it's OK to be prejudiced against people for their dumb names, but there's really nothing stopping them from changing those dumb names if they want.
Well for starters, Ebay has a buyer-review system so that buyers can review and rate sellers. If a seller sucks, people are going to complain and give them terrible ratings, which immediately show up when you look at a listing. Amazon has a similar but crappy system that doesn't work remotely as well, and is set up to allow sellers to offer incentives to people to change their reviews.
I'm not willing to pay any extra for vetting. It should be free. I don't pay extra for "vetting" when I buy something sold by Amazon and shipped out of an Amazon warehouse, so why should I pay extra for something they sell from a 3rd party but don't make entirely obvious that it's coming from a 3rd party?
If Amazon wants to open their platform to 3rd parties, it's their responsibility to vet those sellers. Ebay *only* sells through 3rd parties, but at least they put some real effort into rating those sellers and policing them when there's a problem. Amazon is set up to confuse you about who's selling an item and where it's coming from.
Amazon's really gone down the tubes in the last few years AFAICT. I've shifted a lot of my buying over to Ebay actually; I get better deals, especially if I only need one thing that doesn't cost over $50, since Amazon has high shipping fees if you don't buy enough to pass that threshold for free shipping. I still get some stuff on there, but I have to be really careful, whereas with Ebay I can look at a seller's reputation easily and buy only from sellers with stellar reputations. Amazon really doesn't have such a system, and you frequently don't know who's selling something, and you'll have no idea where it's being sent from except by looking at the projected shipping time. With Ebay, I can easily eliminate all the Chinese sellers by clicking "US only" or "North America only".
I agree completely. This is 100% Amazon's fault. But I do disagree about buying computer parts; I get mine from Ebay. I can easily get off-lease high-end business-class laptops on there for dirt-cheap prices, plus tons of spare parts. Amazon has typically been where I went to get other stuff, like housewares, music CDs (sorry, I think buying music in MP3 format is dumb), a guitar amp, etc. But more and more, I'm finding Ebay is the better place to get stuff. It's even better for buying cheap Chinese stuff; if I'm willing to wait that long, I can look for a seller with a decent reputation and I know what I'm signing up for.
Oh, I should add: after I gave it to her and got her set up, I haven't had to go over to help her with it any more. Maybe I should have set her up with Windows instead, so I'd have an excuse to be over there every other day....