Why not just ticket people for doing things that are dangerous? Like, you know, passing on blind curves. Or penalize people more heavily for CAUSING accidents, rather than just showing the potential to cause accidents? These cameras don't prevent dangerous driving because they take cops off of the road.
Can we fine people for driving an SUV because it takes far longer to stop than my sports car? Or should I be fined for driving a sports car because it can more easily attain truly reckless speeds than an SUV can?
Can we just fine you for being less skilled than the average driver? How about fining you for being of a race that causes an excessively high percentage of accidents?
And I don't think you should be able to own a paintball gun because a thug gang coming into my house and pulverizing my family with assault rifles is not any kind of right.
So you bought commercial software, threw out the disks, then when your hard disk died you got pissed at Apple for it? I'm sorry, but you're just stupid.
A lot of the comments on this topic are fairly pathetic apologists; there's no reason for Apple to not give back the drive if you're paying for the repair, but your comment is even more ridiculous.
I also have a hard time believing they wanted to charge you $702 to replace the drive, especially when all of the other people commenting who have had drives replaced by Apple paid 1/5th or less.
I also completely fail to see how your experience would have been any different with anything other than F/OSS that you could re-download later. But then again, you'd still lose your personal data.
I don't disagree with you at all, except maybe in saying that it has nothing at all to do with the issue. I don't think it's the government's fault (or regulation's fault) per se that Circuit City behaves the way it does... I just think that regulation hugely prevents competition, and *that* is a part of why incompetent corporations thrive. There is nothing in the structure of regulation or the government that promotes shitty corporations over good ones, just that it distorts the free market.
You're right in saying this doesn't explain why the remaining companies pay VPs at the expense of salespeople, except as outlined by some other people who have commented on this topic about the relative value of an exec versus a salesman in Podunk, Iowa. As typical for Slashdot, some have had insightful comments, some... not so much.
Nobody here has all the answers, I merely seek to cut down those who pretend that they do -- by saying, for example, that the free market doesn't work and we need the Democrats to ride in on their white horses and save the world from the evils of the market.
It's much harder to present a comprehensive answer to the ills of the nation, and I won't even attempt to do that. I'm not that smart. Or, rather, not so stupid as to presuppose to.
The funny thing is, everyone likes to blame this sort of crap on those of us who support the free market, using huge executive bonuses for firing poor hourly workers as an example of how the market has failed.
But have any of you stopped to think about why corporations have so much power? Hint to the socialists and interventionist Democrats out there: It has to do with the very policies you push on the market. Corporations are not as powerful on their own as you think they are. They derive their power from being able to throw their weight around and pay off people with REAL power to make coercive actions -- the government.
So while everyone complains that the republicans are handing power over to the corporations (which is only getting more and more true by the minute), the problem is that everyone will now rush to vote in a bunch of democrats who clearly have no desire to reduce the power of the government (since that's how they make THEIR money), just to insert a bunch of NEW laws that give THEM the power they want. They'll tell you "trust us, we have your best interests at heart, we'll CENTRALLY PLAN everything so that the bad corporations can't harm you." And then, of course, they'll use the same power to put in laws that restrict the ability of small business owners to go about their business. Your vote means next to nothing, especially when your choices are between two parties who agree on 95% of the issues. But when you vote with your dollars, avoiding companies that exhibit bad behavior, EVERY vote counts. It's not a two-party system, it's a thousands-of-companies system, with a new startup around the corner just waiting to take your money if the current bunch doesn't serve your needs. And it's not a simple "majority rules" system, either.
Corporations only have the power that you allow them to buy from the government, and no matter what kind of laws you try to enact against it, corporations and rich individuals can and will buy that power from the government.
Your only chance is to limit the power that the government has for sale.
Laws that make doing business harder and more costly affect small businesses more than they affect large businesses. It costs your mom and pop burger shack far more money per burger to meet health codes alone, than it does for McDonalds -- they have economies of scale not just for purchasing food, but for meeting standards, preparing paperwork, dealing with legal troubles, and buying REAL power -- government power.
I'm not saying that, for example, that health codes are bad. I'm saying that you should think real hard before you cry for more laws that increase the power of the corporation relative to the small businessperson, if you're going to bitch about it so much.
For fear of sounding like a troll, but seriously. 10 years ago, nuclear power had a much greater stigma than it does today. The general public has become more and more accepting of it as global warming has become a bigger and bigger issue.
... I welcome this. I have owned 5 cars in my life thus far, and never anything with more than 2 doors. I will be driving sports cars for the rest of my life. My next purchase (second car) will probably be a big V8 sedan that gets poor mileage.
But I welcome this legislation.
Why? Yeah, it's not as good as a more market-based approach such as higher fuel taxes, and the fact that it is a fleet average leads to what you might think are loopholes. But what it does is force automakers to invest in and create technology that improves efficiency for ALL vehicles. If they find a way to make a 50mpg uber-car, that technology can be used in the gas guzzlers I'll always drive, thus improving their mileage as well. I don't mind paying a bit extra to subsidize the research, and this way we won't be forced to all buy cars that meet that standard.
For Apple's DRM'd music, on an iPod, iPhone, or registered computer (Mac/Windows) running iTunes.
How is this worse than Microsoft's play?
What's confusing about Microsoft has done here is called PlaysForSure "Vista Compatible" while ignoring the fact that it also works on XP and whatever else. They also call Zune music "Vista Compatible" but the two formats are not compatible with each other.
Or with music players that most of the world owns.
What is with radio controlled clocks? They seem worthless to me. I have an Oregon Scientific one sitting on my desk here that has never seen a time signal. Not here at my desk at the very south tip of the SF Bay, not at my old house 5 miles away, not sitting outside in the driveway or by the window. I've had it in the Seattle area as well, and it has never received a signal there, either.
Is this whole thing a joke, or do these clocks actually work for some people? I had another one several years ago that also did not work.
Does anybody happen to know how I might go about recovering data from a similarly damaged disk? I'm not sure if maybe there are companies that, say, perform such services for a fee. That would be hugely beneficial to the computing community as a whole.
If there are companies that recover data, how come we never hear about them in Slashdot articles? It would seem relevant to this audience.
How come all of the idiots write MAC in capital letters? Is it so it's easier to spot the 'tards?
While I agree with the OP that the mouse was not harmful per se, I fully support its placement on the list, because truly stupid ideas are often funnier than harmful ones. The puck mouse was very uncomfortable to use and really was a terrible idea.
But then, I hate the mighty mouse that came with my Mac Pro because you have to lift your finger off the left side of the mouse when right-clicking so that it does not register it as a left-click instead. Terrible design. Advantage: MX-1000.
Students in countries where there ISN'T a tradition of taking out huge loans to pay for college end up with worse education, and society gets less out of their labor.
Look, there's a reason that in places like France, where University education is next to free, nobody ever wants to graduate. Between cheap education, high unemployment, and demand to lower the retirement age, people are doing whatever they can to work as little as possible. Sounds great, right? But that cheap university education you spend 6 years of your life on isn't free. The money has to come from somewhere, and as long as nobody wants to work, it'll be hard to find the funding.
I hate people who complain about how they're slaves to their mortgages and work all their lives to pay the bank for various necessities. These are all the idiots too stupid to realize most of the stuff they have isn't necessity, and it's not SOCIETY's fault for pushing that crap on them, it's their own.
Furthermore, how does this compare to any other point in history? How is slaving away to pay a bank any worse than anything else? If you lived in the 1750s, you'd be bitching about how you have to get up before dawn to slave away on your farm, work all day just to provide enough food for your family. You're barely getting by, and one bad winter could wipe it all out.
Get over yourself and your sense of entitlement. The shit you decided to buy is not free. If you bought less shit, you wouldn't have to work as much.
Never have, never will. Sure, their business practices suck, but I just won't support a company that exerts so much control over industries that could do without their meddling -- witness Wal-Mart demanding and creating a market for censored music when its not what most of their customers want, but many of them do not have a choice.
WM is indeed useless. Refute all of Pogue's points all you want, but the fact of the matter is the task manager and UI lag make WM devices unusable as a cell phone. Your phone should NEVER hang, ignore incoming calls, or any of that BS. I simply don't see how anyone can make a positive review of one of these devices.
Only someone who has not used Windows Mobile would call it "quite good."
Read the link to Pogue's review; he's right. These are only some of the annoyances you'll notice in the first 10 minutes using a WM device. Not ready for primetime.
And Steve Jobs is petulant and petty enough to create this ad just to get back at NBCU... though I guess it would require more than just one media content pulling their content from iTunes for this to be something Mr. Jobs would choose to do.
... but my iPhone is still slow as hell doing anything on EDGE.
It was well worth the (lower) price, as 400 is what most of my phones have cost, and they last me a long time, but I get the feeling I won't have this one for very long if the 3G version comes out soon:)
Because power corrupts. Big government is inherently in the pocket of corporations that can pay up.
I laugh every time I see a whiny liberal talk about how the Democrats are going to ride in on a white horse and come up with a thousand laws limiting the power of businesses. GUESS WHAT? It's the laws that give businesses the power.
Corporations cannot use force.
Governments can.
As soon as the democrats start fucking things up, the republican machine will get going and try to convince every undecided voter that the democrats are the problem.. wash, rinse, repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I have a dumbass question.
Why not just ticket people for doing things that are dangerous? Like, you know, passing on blind curves. Or penalize people more heavily for CAUSING accidents, rather than just showing the potential to cause accidents? These cameras don't prevent dangerous driving because they take cops off of the road.
Can we fine people for driving an SUV because it takes far longer to stop than my sports car? Or should I be fined for driving a sports car because it can more easily attain truly reckless speeds than an SUV can?
Can we just fine you for being less skilled than the average driver? How about fining you for being of a race that causes an excessively high percentage of accidents?
Dude, nice straw man argument.
And I don't think you should be able to own a paintball gun because a thug gang coming into my house and pulverizing my family with assault rifles is not any kind of right.
Try again.
So you bought commercial software, threw out the disks, then when your hard disk died you got pissed at Apple for it? I'm sorry, but you're just stupid.
A lot of the comments on this topic are fairly pathetic apologists; there's no reason for Apple to not give back the drive if you're paying for the repair, but your comment is even more ridiculous.
I also have a hard time believing they wanted to charge you $702 to replace the drive, especially when all of the other people commenting who have had drives replaced by Apple paid 1/5th or less.
I also completely fail to see how your experience would have been any different with anything other than F/OSS that you could re-download later. But then again, you'd still lose your personal data.
Fail.
I don't disagree with you at all, except maybe in saying that it has nothing at all to do with the issue. I don't think it's the government's fault (or regulation's fault) per se that Circuit City behaves the way it does... I just think that regulation hugely prevents competition, and *that* is a part of why incompetent corporations thrive. There is nothing in the structure of regulation or the government that promotes shitty corporations over good ones, just that it distorts the free market.
You're right in saying this doesn't explain why the remaining companies pay VPs at the expense of salespeople, except as outlined by some other people who have commented on this topic about the relative value of an exec versus a salesman in Podunk, Iowa. As typical for Slashdot, some have had insightful comments, some... not so much.
Nobody here has all the answers, I merely seek to cut down those who pretend that they do -- by saying, for example, that the free market doesn't work and we need the Democrats to ride in on their white horses and save the world from the evils of the market.
It's much harder to present a comprehensive answer to the ills of the nation, and I won't even attempt to do that. I'm not that smart. Or, rather, not so stupid as to presuppose to.
The funny thing is, everyone likes to blame this sort of crap on those of us who support the free market, using huge executive bonuses for firing poor hourly workers as an example of how the market has failed.
But have any of you stopped to think about why corporations have so much power? Hint to the socialists and interventionist Democrats out there: It has to do with the very policies you push on the market. Corporations are not as powerful on their own as you think they are. They derive their power from being able to throw their weight around and pay off people with REAL power to make coercive actions -- the government.
So while everyone complains that the republicans are handing power over to the corporations (which is only getting more and more true by the minute), the problem is that everyone will now rush to vote in a bunch of democrats who clearly have no desire to reduce the power of the government (since that's how they make THEIR money), just to insert a bunch of NEW laws that give THEM the power they want. They'll tell you "trust us, we have your best interests at heart, we'll CENTRALLY PLAN everything so that the bad corporations can't harm you." And then, of course, they'll use the same power to put in laws that restrict the ability of small business owners to go about their business. Your vote means next to nothing, especially when your choices are between two parties who agree on 95% of the issues. But when you vote with your dollars, avoiding companies that exhibit bad behavior, EVERY vote counts. It's not a two-party system, it's a thousands-of-companies system, with a new startup around the corner just waiting to take your money if the current bunch doesn't serve your needs. And it's not a simple "majority rules" system, either.
Corporations only have the power that you allow them to buy from the government, and no matter what kind of laws you try to enact against it, corporations and rich individuals can and will buy that power from the government.
Your only chance is to limit the power that the government has for sale.
Laws that make doing business harder and more costly affect small businesses more than they affect large businesses. It costs your mom and pop burger shack far more money per burger to meet health codes alone, than it does for McDonalds -- they have economies of scale not just for purchasing food, but for meeting standards, preparing paperwork, dealing with legal troubles, and buying REAL power -- government power.
I'm not saying that, for example, that health codes are bad. I'm saying that you should think real hard before you cry for more laws that increase the power of the corporation relative to the small businessperson, if you're going to bitch about it so much.
For fear of sounding like a troll, but seriously. 10 years ago, nuclear power had a much greater stigma than it does today. The general public has become more and more accepting of it as global warming has become a bigger and bigger issue.
Try reading the comments before posting, Gomer.
... I welcome this. I have owned 5 cars in my life thus far, and never anything with more than 2 doors. I will be driving sports cars for the rest of my life. My next purchase (second car) will probably be a big V8 sedan that gets poor mileage.
But I welcome this legislation.
Why? Yeah, it's not as good as a more market-based approach such as higher fuel taxes, and the fact that it is a fleet average leads to what you might think are loopholes. But what it does is force automakers to invest in and create technology that improves efficiency for ALL vehicles. If they find a way to make a 50mpg uber-car, that technology can be used in the gas guzzlers I'll always drive, thus improving their mileage as well. I don't mind paying a bit extra to subsidize the research, and this way we won't be forced to all buy cars that meet that standard.
We all know Zune and PlaysForSure are incompatible.
Can other hardware makers now abandon their PlaysForSure efforts and jump on the Zune DRM bandwagon, or will Microsoft not license it to them?
Of course, now that both are called "Windows Vista Compatible" this idea is harder to explain... I can see it now:
"Can we stop making Windows Vista Compatible players, and instead adopt the new Microsoft DRM scheme to make our players Windows Vista Compatible?"
For Apple's DRM'd music, on an iPod, iPhone, or registered computer (Mac/Windows) running iTunes.
How is this worse than Microsoft's play?
What's confusing about Microsoft has done here is called PlaysForSure "Vista Compatible" while ignoring the fact that it also works on XP and whatever else. They also call Zune music "Vista Compatible" but the two formats are not compatible with each other.
Or with music players that most of the world owns.
As in, "you've just been Rogered arseways by your ISP?"
What is with radio controlled clocks? They seem worthless to me. I have an Oregon Scientific one sitting on my desk here that has never seen a time signal. Not here at my desk at the very south tip of the SF Bay, not at my old house 5 miles away, not sitting outside in the driveway or by the window. I've had it in the Seattle area as well, and it has never received a signal there, either.
Is this whole thing a joke, or do these clocks actually work for some people? I had another one several years ago that also did not work.
Does anybody happen to know how I might go about recovering data from a similarly damaged disk? I'm not sure if maybe there are companies that, say, perform such services for a fee. That would be hugely beneficial to the computing community as a whole.
If there are companies that recover data, how come we never hear about them in Slashdot articles? It would seem relevant to this audience.
How come all of the idiots write MAC in capital letters? Is it so it's easier to spot the 'tards?
While I agree with the OP that the mouse was not harmful per se, I fully support its placement on the list, because truly stupid ideas are often funnier than harmful ones. The puck mouse was very uncomfortable to use and really was a terrible idea.
But then, I hate the mighty mouse that came with my Mac Pro because you have to lift your finger off the left side of the mouse when right-clicking so that it does not register it as a left-click instead. Terrible design. Advantage: MX-1000.
Students in countries where there ISN'T a tradition of taking out huge loans to pay for college end up with worse education, and society gets less out of their labor.
Look, there's a reason that in places like France, where University education is next to free, nobody ever wants to graduate. Between cheap education, high unemployment, and demand to lower the retirement age, people are doing whatever they can to work as little as possible. Sounds great, right? But that cheap university education you spend 6 years of your life on isn't free. The money has to come from somewhere, and as long as nobody wants to work, it'll be hard to find the funding.
I hate people who complain about how they're slaves to their mortgages and work all their lives to pay the bank for various necessities. These are all the idiots too stupid to realize most of the stuff they have isn't necessity, and it's not SOCIETY's fault for pushing that crap on them, it's their own.
Furthermore, how does this compare to any other point in history? How is slaving away to pay a bank any worse than anything else? If you lived in the 1750s, you'd be bitching about how you have to get up before dawn to slave away on your farm, work all day just to provide enough food for your family. You're barely getting by, and one bad winter could wipe it all out.
Get over yourself and your sense of entitlement. The shit you decided to buy is not free. If you bought less shit, you wouldn't have to work as much.
Never have, never will. Sure, their business practices suck, but I just won't support a company that exerts so much control over industries that could do without their meddling -- witness Wal-Mart demanding and creating a market for censored music when its not what most of their customers want, but many of them do not have a choice.
WM is indeed useless. Refute all of Pogue's points all you want, but the fact of the matter is the task manager and UI lag make WM devices unusable as a cell phone. Your phone should NEVER hang, ignore incoming calls, or any of that BS. I simply don't see how anyone can make a positive review of one of these devices.
Only someone who has not used Windows Mobile would call it "quite good."
Read the link to Pogue's review; he's right. These are only some of the annoyances you'll notice in the first 10 minutes using a WM device. Not ready for primetime.
That is an awesome idea.
.. though I guess it would require more than just one media content pulling their content from iTunes for this to be something Mr. Jobs would choose to do.
And Steve Jobs is petulant and petty enough to create this ad just to get back at NBCU.
I see the large hit to Apple's stock caused their market cap to exceed that of IBM.
A kudos to your well-reasoned argument, sir.
... film at 11.
... but my iPhone is still slow as hell doing anything on EDGE.
:)
It was well worth the (lower) price, as 400 is what most of my phones have cost, and they last me a long time, but I get the feeling I won't have this one for very long if the 3G version comes out soon
So the fact that any nation, no matter how small, has an equal say in the WTO, means that the WTO only serves big, powerful nations?
You do realize WTO actions have to pass unanimously, right?
Good luck with that argument.
Because power corrupts. Big government is inherently in the pocket of corporations that can pay up.
I laugh every time I see a whiny liberal talk about how the Democrats are going to ride in on a white horse and come up with a thousand laws limiting the power of businesses. GUESS WHAT? It's the laws that give businesses the power.
Corporations cannot use force.
Governments can.
As soon as the democrats start fucking things up, the republican machine will get going and try to convince every undecided voter that the democrats are the problem.. wash, rinse, repeat.
... since they lose money on virtually everything they do, short of Windows and Office. I bet they make money on keyboards and mice, too.