I have looked at the TCO, and it doesn't pay off. For disclosure though, I don't run a tech department - so my costs involve different things.
I have to be cognizant of the desired skills my team brings to the table and the experience they have using those skills, the ability to jump from one user environment to another frankly isn't one of them.
Until you have to lay someone off, you can eat a dick. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Good management will make decisions that don't negatively affect the productivity and profitability of their department while keeping their staff happy AND employed.
I happen to think my team members' livelihoods are more important than my opportunity to appear ingenious. If that makes me look like a fucking idiot to you, fine - I DON'T ANSWER TO YOUR SUBORDINATE ASS. The people I DO answer to fully understand why I made the decisions I made, and they approve.
I can't afford to move my team over to Linux without having either alternate placement for my existing windows based team, or adequate funding and time to make them productive on the new systems - so it ain't happening.
Only a truly shitty manager would think it was worth it to release a team of productive, honest employees to implement a system that is only "better" in a debatable sense.
The problem is that you cannot show that bias coming from willful intercession vs. the bias caused by superior (in context of the current environment) random trait.
In order to prove/disprove ID, your data sets have to have all biases coming from willful intercession. Its not the existence of bias, which natural selection hinges on, but the source of the bias. That's the only flaw I see, but I do respect the attempt.
In order to be a legitimate scientific theory you have to be able to create tests that prove a theory as false or inaccurate - not tests that establish the theory as fact.
Once you beat the hell out of a theory from many different angles over a period of time, AND you can begin to accurately predict the outcome of your tests before you execute them, you get CREDIBILITY. It still isn't a FACT. In fact, it's still referred to as a theory by scientists.
The only facts are the results of your TEST.
Now, develop one falsifiable test on a theory of life that has ALL of its function wrapped up in the abilities of an Omnipotent, Omnicient, Omnipresent entity that does not present itself but only lets itself be known to those who demonstrate "faith"?
Now tell me why an Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent entity needs a fucking plan? A plan gets you from state A to state B while minimizing risk and maximizing efficiencies. What part of that is needed by something that can do DO ANYTHING, KNOWS EVERYTHING, AND IS EVERYWHERE AND WHEN?
I am so sick of people spouting off "God's plan" like they have any fucking clue as to the mindset of a being as powerful as a true god. I'm no Atheist, I believe in a god, but not this anthropomorphic piece of social control zealots seem to know so well.
Science and god don't contradict one another, Science and RELIGION do. Its the one thing that religious nuts know and hate. You don't want the truth, you want your story to BE the truth.
ANY argument based on an idea that only becomes credible if you choose to accept DOGMA as truth lacks any understanding of how ANYTHING works. This becomes even more apparent when that DOGMA is focused on humans telling other humans what an OMNIPOTENT, OMNICIENT, and OMNIPRESENT beings's motivations are.
You lack the fundamental ability to even comprehend how such an existence would manifest itself, much less be able to map its quantity and depth of perception to your measly five senses (which happen to be temporally and locally bound).
And before you start ranting on how can I know a god with all this being true, let me say I can't. What I can do is immediately tell anyone who tells me that they know what God wants, or what God was thinking, that they can go fuck themselves.
The Dragonlance Chronicles are easy reads by Weiss and Hickman.
Flowers for Algernon isn't too dark, and it's short.
Many people have already mentioned Pratchett, but I would focus on stories that center around Carrot. He's the embodiment of selfless good.
I found Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet to be very engaging.
Here's a departure from your theme, but many of the D&D rulebooks are AWESOME imaginary catalysts. No real story, but they always provoked me into thought by giving me a framework to build my own worlds. They still do have that "loser" stigma to them even if geekiness is en vogue.
I have a problem when 'legal' gets in the way of what I consider is 'sensible' or 'right'. This is the crux of why people are giving you grief. Oh, not because you feel this way, many of us do, and we often execute behaviors resultant from this perspective. Its that you keep trying to shrug off, instead of take accountability, for the end result of this behavior.
See, admitting you did something wrong, or admitting that you know something you do is unacceptable, doesn't absolve you from any criticism. You beleive that their is nothing inherently wrong with your actions, but that whole perspective is based on you from you.
Many of us have a much larger, and complex, world view. In this world view your actions, and justifications, are base. The only evidence I need to prove this is that you keep trying to justify your behavior and dislikes instead of just accepting the consequences of your behavior. You never try to demonstrate how you can create a LEGAL methodology to behave in the manner you want, and then show the positive benefits of it. You don't try to give any other evidence that the illegal things you do are justified by logic other than "you don't see the problem".
You are trying to get approval for your agenda, and presenting it under the guise that we don't understand what your perspective is. You keep saying the same thing over and over with refinements tailored to the criticism specifically targeted at you. You shift between terms like illegal and wrong as if they were synonyms, the whole while you dance around the concepts of ethical and moral.
At the heart of it, your posts in this thread have consisted of trying to convince people that they should adopt your justifications for your behavior when they are evaluating your behavior, and that their criteria is invalid because it isn't yours.
That isn't enlightened.
Defining it as "thinking for yourself" isn't accurate either, just your preference. More appropriately its "thinking about yourself." If you want to equate breaking laws with thinking for yourself, have at it. Just realize that if you we're really thinking, you'd be undoing the laws, not breaking them.
I wonder how many times I'm going to have to point out to you people that I do buy all my music these days, though I will send songs I like to my bro just so he can have a listen. I don't have a problem with people pirating a little to try new stuff and expand their tastes, but I do have a problem if people get stuff with no intention of buying it. The problem isn't with YOU buying music, its your blatant disregard for the proprietor's terms concerning whatever ITEM you feel should be pirated so you or others can "test it out."
It's the most ignorant, self centric opinion you can have.
You didn't say "I wish that more businesses would allow test runs of their products so I can determine whether or not I like them." That would be an opinion that respected the rights of the proprietor and the consumer. You instead state that you have no issue with piracy for the purpose of "trying new stuff." This stance completely ignores the proprietor of the item you wish to pirate.
Just because a car dealer chooses to offer test drives doesn't mean you get to unilaterally extend that concept to any business you want while in pursuit of one of their ITEMs.
If someone doesn't offer free samples or demos for you to try, then their revenue model will be affected by it. They make the ITEM, they sell the ITEM. If you want the ITEM, you do what they want you to do to get the ITEM. If they want you to do something that you don't want to do, fine. But you don't then get to declare that you still get the ITEM. You don't get to dictate to the proprietor the terms of service in any other way other than choosing, or not choosing, to purchase their product or negotiating different terms.
And before I hear that tired sentiment of "they're not losing a sale because I wouldn't have bought it anyway" bullshit, please realize that line of thinking concludes with you not having the ITEM either.
You have stated previously in this thread that your ethical outlook slackens even more when it comes to companies you don't like, specifically MS. I'm not stating you have to like MS, I'm not stating you have to use their products. Yet saying that pirating from them is even more OK because you hate them is trite. Not only is it trite, but it is a sentiment cloaked under the auspice of consumer rights when it should be more appropriately be categorized as free trade - which once you get to the bottom of it has more to do with corporate profits than consumer benefits.
For example, show me a CONSUMER who asked for Office to be unbundled from Windows OS packages? That was other BUSINESSES wanting more open competition. That's often mistaken by many to be MS trying to bilke consumers out of every dime they can. Its often used as a point of argument when people discuss why they hate MS. Sorry, that was the competition to MS trying to get your dollars under the auspice of helping you.
Did MS do some shitty things concerning their API's? Yes they did, and they we're taken to court, declared to have acted inappropriately, and given punishment. They also took a huge PR hit, spawned groups completely devoted to their downfall, and basically self created legitimate arguments that competitors can use to convince consumers to switch. These are significant penalties. Please don't mistake that they aren't just because they aren't fast acting or immediate enough to suit your definition of justice.
Your opinion is based on the fact that you FEEL it wasn't enough. Well guess what, your FEELING on the issue don't mean fuck all in the business world. Don't like it, cry or change it. Fundamentally, the problem is your attitude boils down to "it's what we want to do, so we're gonna do it". Sure, go ahead, be that way. I'm not gonna stop you.
Just don't bitch when others view it as unenlightened, illegitimate, and ill informed.
This is wrong. The guerrilla movement in Vietnam was roused against the French, which was the ruling class. America became involved after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. We weren't fighting against the existing governments peasants, we were fighting against peasants who were fighting the existing government's soldiers.
1) Make some tech that seems cool. 2) Get a little seed money. 3) Give the shit away for free, IF the consumer hands you a ton of personal data. 4) Sell demographic data to niche marketeers on a subscription model. 5) Profit like a motherfucker.
This alone is enough for me to come to the conclusion that the prizes aren't awarded based on any sort of absolute and undeniable knowledge, they are awarded based on the knowledge of the day, and the social and cultural perspectives of the people at the time.
People make mistakes, even smart people. To conclude that some knowledge is absolute because it won an award is asinine.
The ISP isn't charging you for it, its a free service. Now, that's not enough to clear of the act.
But what the above two services did was send you a copy, they got nailed on the distribution end of the idea. The legal trick was that the action never took place against your specific physical copy. The CleanFlicks issue was a video store that rented the videos to people who didn't own them, and that isn't fair use.
In this instance the alteration DOES take place against the original copy, en route to you, and never creates a second instance.
I agree, but their stance isn't that they're re-releasing it, its that they are acting as an agent of the user.
I can take a song, inject "Buy coke" at the end of every refrain, and play it to myself all day long.
My stance is that in order to nip this in the bud we need to get fair use, as its being abused in this manner, to be eligible only on the user client. If I want to change how a page renders, only I can exercise that right at the browser level, not my ISP upstream. I don't believe copyright infringement is a strong enough argument to get this stopped. Defining where the right can be exercised would be more formidable.
Without going into it again, I posted a prospected stance that the ISP would take once challenged on this here.
Before people start flaming me to death, please note I am not taking the stance that I think this is great and awesome, just being honest with myself about the shit that is going to get thrown back at me when I take action.
You could basically take the Monomyth as the framework, create some "object oriented" interactions corresponding to the various available environments and bake.
The trick is not to have the "object oriented" methods just be pixel and name swaps. Make the actual elements unique in not only surface presentation, but also in gameplay mechanics.
I going out on a limb here, but even though you may be correct I think the more common usage (correct or not) of media is to refer to a set as a whole.
The media contains different mediums just as a herd contains cows.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it could be I'm really good at my job.
There is no such thing as the Kobayashi Maru.
I have looked at the TCO, and it doesn't pay off. For disclosure though, I don't run a tech department - so my costs involve different things.
I have to be cognizant of the desired skills my team brings to the table and the experience they have using those skills, the ability to jump from one user environment to another frankly isn't one of them.
If you want, I'll let you borrow my pencil.
Until you have to lay someone off, you can eat a dick. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Good management will make decisions that don't negatively affect the productivity and profitability of their department while keeping their staff happy AND employed.
I happen to think my team members' livelihoods are more important than my opportunity to appear ingenious. If that makes me look like a fucking idiot to you, fine - I DON'T ANSWER TO YOUR SUBORDINATE ASS. The people I DO answer to fully understand why I made the decisions I made, and they approve.
I can't afford to move my team over to Linux without having either alternate placement for my existing windows based team, or adequate funding and time to make them productive on the new systems - so it ain't happening.
Only a truly shitty manager would think it was worth it to release a team of productive, honest employees to implement a system that is only "better" in a debatable sense.
The problem is that you cannot show that bias coming from willful intercession vs. the bias caused by superior (in context of the current environment) random trait.
In order to prove/disprove ID, your data sets have to have all biases coming from willful intercession. Its not the existence of bias, which natural selection hinges on, but the source of the bias. That's the only flaw I see, but I do respect the attempt.
Sure it is.
What you don't see me doing is trying to use it as the crux of an argument and labeling it as scientific.
You also don't see me proclaiming that other people should behave the same way or suffer ill effect X.
In order to be a legitimate scientific theory you have to be able to create tests that prove a theory as false or inaccurate - not tests that establish the theory as fact.
Once you beat the hell out of a theory from many different angles over a period of time, AND you can begin to accurately predict the outcome of your tests before you execute them, you get CREDIBILITY. It still isn't a FACT. In fact, it's still referred to as a theory by scientists.
The only facts are the results of your TEST.
Now, develop one falsifiable test on a theory of life that has ALL of its function wrapped up in the abilities of an Omnipotent, Omnicient, Omnipresent entity that does not present itself but only lets itself be known to those who demonstrate "faith"?
Now tell me why an Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent entity needs a fucking plan? A plan gets you from state A to state B while minimizing risk and maximizing efficiencies. What part of that is needed by something that can do DO ANYTHING, KNOWS EVERYTHING, AND IS EVERYWHERE AND WHEN?
I am so sick of people spouting off "God's plan" like they have any fucking clue as to the mindset of a being as powerful as a true god. I'm no Atheist, I believe in a god, but not this anthropomorphic piece of social control zealots seem to know so well.
Science and god don't contradict one another, Science and RELIGION do. Its the one thing that religious nuts know and hate. You don't want the truth, you want your story to BE the truth.
ANY argument based on an idea that only becomes credible if you choose to accept DOGMA as truth lacks any understanding of how ANYTHING works. This becomes even more apparent when that DOGMA is focused on humans telling other humans what an OMNIPOTENT, OMNICIENT, and OMNIPRESENT beings's motivations are.
You lack the fundamental ability to even comprehend how such an existence would manifest itself, much less be able to map its quantity and depth of perception to your measly five senses (which happen to be temporally and locally bound).
And before you start ranting on how can I know a god with all this being true, let me say I can't. What I can do is immediately tell anyone who tells me that they know what God wants, or what God was thinking, that they can go fuck themselves.
The Dragonlance Chronicles are easy reads by Weiss and Hickman.
Flowers for Algernon isn't too dark, and it's short.
Many people have already mentioned Pratchett, but I would focus on stories that center around Carrot. He's the embodiment of selfless good.
I found Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet to be very engaging.
Here's a departure from your theme, but many of the D&D rulebooks are AWESOME imaginary catalysts. No real story, but they always provoked me into thought by giving me a framework to build my own worlds. They still do have that "loser" stigma to them even if geekiness is en vogue.
Ooooh, oooohh oooohhh AHHHH AHHH AHHH AHHHHH!
RwaAAAAA! RwAAAAAAA! RwAAAAAAAAAA! EEEEEEEH, EEEEEEHHH, EEEEEEEEEHH!
Space-Banana.
Search isn't their product.
They sell YOU to the ADVERTISERS.
Only three people have voting rights in Google. Larry, Sergey, and Eric.
See, admitting you did something wrong, or admitting that you know something you do is unacceptable, doesn't absolve you from any criticism. You beleive that their is nothing inherently wrong with your actions, but that whole perspective is based on you from you.
Many of us have a much larger, and complex, world view. In this world view your actions, and justifications, are base. The only evidence I need to prove this is that you keep trying to justify your behavior and dislikes instead of just accepting the consequences of your behavior. You never try to demonstrate how you can create a LEGAL methodology to behave in the manner you want, and then show the positive benefits of it. You don't try to give any other evidence that the illegal things you do are justified by logic other than "you don't see the problem".
You are trying to get approval for your agenda, and presenting it under the guise that we don't understand what your perspective is. You keep saying the same thing over and over with refinements tailored to the criticism specifically targeted at you. You shift between terms like illegal and wrong as if they were synonyms, the whole while you dance around the concepts of ethical and moral.
At the heart of it, your posts in this thread have consisted of trying to convince people that they should adopt your justifications for your behavior when they are evaluating your behavior, and that their criteria is invalid because it isn't yours.
That isn't enlightened.
Defining it as "thinking for yourself" isn't accurate either, just your preference. More appropriately its "thinking about yourself." If you want to equate breaking laws with thinking for yourself, have at it. Just realize that if you we're really thinking, you'd be undoing the laws, not breaking them.
It's the most ignorant, self centric opinion you can have.
You didn't say "I wish that more businesses would allow test runs of their products so I can determine whether or not I like them." That would be an opinion that respected the rights of the proprietor and the consumer. You instead state that you have no issue with piracy for the purpose of "trying new stuff." This stance completely ignores the proprietor of the item you wish to pirate.
Just because a car dealer chooses to offer test drives doesn't mean you get to unilaterally extend that concept to any business you want while in pursuit of one of their ITEMs.
If someone doesn't offer free samples or demos for you to try, then their revenue model will be affected by it. They make the ITEM, they sell the ITEM. If you want the ITEM, you do what they want you to do to get the ITEM. If they want you to do something that you don't want to do, fine. But you don't then get to declare that you still get the ITEM. You don't get to dictate to the proprietor the terms of service in any other way other than choosing, or not choosing, to purchase their product or negotiating different terms.
And before I hear that tired sentiment of "they're not losing a sale because I wouldn't have bought it anyway" bullshit, please realize that line of thinking concludes with you not having the ITEM either.
You have stated previously in this thread that your ethical outlook slackens even more when it comes to companies you don't like, specifically MS. I'm not stating you have to like MS, I'm not stating you have to use their products. Yet saying that pirating from them is even more OK because you hate them is trite. Not only is it trite, but it is a sentiment cloaked under the auspice of consumer rights when it should be more appropriately be categorized as free trade - which once you get to the bottom of it has more to do with corporate profits than consumer benefits.
For example, show me a CONSUMER who asked for Office to be unbundled from Windows OS packages? That was other BUSINESSES wanting more open competition. That's often mistaken by many to be MS trying to bilke consumers out of every dime they can. Its often used as a point of argument when people discuss why they hate MS. Sorry, that was the competition to MS trying to get your dollars under the auspice of helping you.
Did MS do some shitty things concerning their API's? Yes they did, and they we're taken to court, declared to have acted inappropriately, and given punishment. They also took a huge PR hit, spawned groups completely devoted to their downfall, and basically self created legitimate arguments that competitors can use to convince consumers to switch. These are significant penalties. Please don't mistake that they aren't just because they aren't fast acting or immediate enough to suit your definition of justice.
Your opinion is based on the fact that you FEEL it wasn't enough. Well guess what, your FEELING on the issue don't mean fuck all in the business world. Don't like it, cry or change it. Fundamentally, the problem is your attitude boils down to "it's what we want to do, so we're gonna do it". Sure, go ahead, be that way. I'm not gonna stop you.
Just don't bitch when others view it as unenlightened, illegitimate, and ill informed.
A perfect example of trying to be right instead of discovering a/the truth through discourse.
This is wrong. The guerrilla movement in Vietnam was roused against the French, which was the ruling class. America became involved after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. We weren't fighting against the existing governments peasants, we were fighting against peasants who were fighting the existing government's soldiers.
That's not how you do it now. Now its:
1) Make some tech that seems cool.
2) Get a little seed money.
3) Give the shit away for free, IF the consumer hands you a ton of personal data.
4) Sell demographic data to niche marketeers on a subscription model.
5) Profit like a motherfucker.
Here's a fact.
The 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine went to the guy who invented the Lobotomy. This procedure has later been referred to "as one of the most barbaric mistakes ever perpetrated by mainstream medicine".
This alone is enough for me to come to the conclusion that the prizes aren't awarded based on any sort of absolute and undeniable knowledge, they are awarded based on the knowledge of the day, and the social and cultural perspectives of the people at the time.
People make mistakes, even smart people. To conclude that some knowledge is absolute because it won an award is asinine.
The ISP isn't charging you for it, its a free service. Now, that's not enough to clear of the act.
But what the above two services did was send you a copy, they got nailed on the distribution end of the idea. The legal trick was that the action never took place against your specific physical copy. The CleanFlicks issue was a video store that rented the videos to people who didn't own them, and that isn't fair use.
In this instance the alteration DOES take place against the original copy, en route to you, and never creates a second instance.
I agree, but their stance isn't that they're re-releasing it, its that they are acting as an agent of the user.
I can take a song, inject "Buy coke" at the end of every refrain, and play it to myself all day long.
My stance is that in order to nip this in the bud we need to get fair use, as its being abused in this manner, to be eligible only on the user client. If I want to change how a page renders, only I can exercise that right at the browser level, not my ISP upstream. I don't believe copyright infringement is a strong enough argument to get this stopped. Defining where the right can be exercised would be more formidable.
Derivative works are protected under fair use.
Without going into it again, I posted a prospected stance that the ISP would take once challenged on this here.
Before people start flaming me to death, please note I am not taking the stance that I think this is great and awesome, just being honest with myself about the shit that is going to get thrown back at me when I take action.
You could basically take the Monomyth as the framework, create some "object oriented" interactions corresponding to the various available environments and bake.
The trick is not to have the "object oriented" methods just be pixel and name swaps. Make the actual elements unique in not only surface presentation, but also in gameplay mechanics.
I vote for a "circus".
Hrmmm.
I going out on a limb here, but even though you may be correct I think the more common usage (correct or not) of media is to refer to a set as a whole.
The media contains different mediums just as a herd contains cows.
Now get me sound without having to get another cable.