RE: Anonymous call rejection.
You're right that US cell carriers (at least to the best of my knowledge) don't offer anon. call rejection, but some (many?) phones offer it. My first cell phone (Nokia 6150, back in '98) offered this. My newer phone (Sanyo 8100) does not. So this is probably something you would want to look at on the specific phones you are interested in. My guess is that any Nokia phone will have this feature, while others may or may not. LG phones also have a fairly nice/featureful UI (I had an LG 5350 for a while), but in my experience they aren't as well-made (I went through about 5 of them before Sprint finally gave me the Sanyo 8100 for free).
If in the US, see Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act, specifically making this illegal. Not changing oil the oil at all could void your warranty, but changing it yourself most certainly will not.
It *IS* another sales tactic. The employee is there to make sales. A good customer recognizes and expects this. But while the employee is there to make a sale, they are not there to be rude. Using a sales tactic to try to sell a service plan is not a bad thing. Using it repeatedly after the service plan has been declined *is* a bad thing. Therein lies the difference.
If you work in customer service and you believe that harassing customers about crap like PSPs is the proper way of going about your job, you seriously need a new job. I've worked in customer service for over 6 years, and now manage a store. If any of my employees ever treated a customer the way I'm reading in this thread about Best Buy customers being treated, that employee would be thrown out on their ass in no time at all.
Customer service is NOT customer harassment. They are two very different things. Good customer service/salesmanship is saying "we also have an extended service plan available which gives you these extra benefits (lists benefits). Would you be interested in finding out more about that?" Then, if the plan is well presented in a curteous manner, the customer may be interested in finding out more, and the sales rep can tell them more and get them signed up. If on the other hand the person doesn't want it, a good customer service/sales rep will back off, sell them the product, find out if there are any other items they may need ("do you need any cables to get that hooked up?" or "especially since you won't be covered by the extended service plan, you should be aware that the biggest killer of these widgets is power surges... do you have a quality surge supressor or UPS?"). Then the customer leaves well informed and having made a purchase, but feeling as though they were helped by a truly caring person instead of feeling harassed and pushed into buying something they didn't want.
You say you "see people all the time who enjoy getting pissed off at customer reps." Did you ever stop to consider that probably many of them have good reason? Yes I get the occasional inconsolable asshole in my store, but I probably have at most 1 or 2 pissed off customers every month.
All in all, customer service is what you make of it, and customers will typically treat employees much as they are treated by the employee. If the customers are treated with respect, they will typically treat the employees with respect. If the rep is rude and pushy, the customer will also be rude and pushy, to an extreme.
Flying J also charges for access... it may appear as an open AP, but did you actually connect to one and use it successfully without paying? That is the true test, as most open APs have some sort of device behind them authenticating users or in some way restricting access.
As far as truckers requiring high-quality wireless, remember that many of them are away from home at days or weeks at a time... What better way to stay in touch with people than email? Especially when they can pull into a Flying J and connect easily from the comfort of their cab.
Better yet... weigh an empty gas can. Fill it with gas from the pump. Record the amount the pump says has been pumped. Find a very accurate weight for gasoline, and some very accurate scales. Weigh the gas can once full, and subtract the empty weight. Calculate amount of gas based off the weight.
It seems to me that it may be easier to find accurate scales than an adequately sized accurate graduated container, not to mention the results may be more accurate.
Disney has been using this launch method for their fireworks for years. I remember visiting disneyland in elementary school (10+ years ago) and reading about their launch method, and this is the same system they were using then. Unique, yes. Kinda cool, yes. Possibly easier to choreograph than traditional BP-launched fireworks also. But still, nothing terribly new.
I realize this is complete and utter rubbish flamebait I'm responding to, but these are two totally seperate animals you're talking about. "Windows" (as in MS Windows), is a very generic word used to describe a graphical, _windowed_ operating system. The term "window manager" and "window system" are generic, used by graphical OSs since before the time of MS Windows. I wouldn't say Lindows is a parody, either. Possibly it is part parody, but it is fitting; it brings to mind a Linux-based OS which behaves similarly to MS Windows. (ie it is a windowed operating system)
Moore's title-theft, however, is different. First point of difference: Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which paper burns, which is integral to the movie. Fahrenheit 9/11 makes reference to the movie content with the "9/11" part, but what does "Fahrenheit" have to do with anything? Because there was a fire in the buildings? woohoo. It's not integral to the theme of the movie that there was a fire. The movie is political propaganda, designed by a skilled lier to attempt to sway an election. To mistake it as anything more significant is folly. That no one has taken Moore out in the streets and publicly flogged him for idiocy and for lying to the public through his agitpropumentaries is telling of the sad state of our society.
If you take two identical PCs, load Mandrake 10 on one, and Slackware 10 on the other, have the same window manager and everything else, you'll definitely see a difference in that Mandrake 10 has a MUCH faster feel.
This probably has quite a lot to do with the Mandrake builds being optimized for i686 while the slack builds are optimized for i486. This may make slack a bit more sluggish in some situations, but it also means I can grab an old 486 dx25 laptop, throw a very basic install of slack on it, and use it for network stuffs with no problems at all. This is definately something not doable with Mandrake.
And I might add that anyone fairly skilled in electronics design can build a decently long-range RFID reader/retransmitter, so why anyone would rely on something RFID based for anything remotely sensitive is far beyond me. I would think the only even remotely secure way of doing this would be to use something like bluetooth with an encrypted number and rotating key scheme or something. This would at least be marginally harder to crack.
A small snippet from the slackware-current ChangeLog.txt:
"I also noticed that the ATI Radeon binary drivers designed for XFree86 4.3.0 do not work with XFree86 4.4.0, but do work with the X.Org release."
Full ChangeLog.txt is available here, for those who are interested. The XFree86 to X.Org change is toward the bottom of the entry for Sun May 30 01:06:39 PDT 2004.
Actually, in a reasonable jursidiction, one won't even go before a court for acting in self-defense. If they do, it will be very brief.
Also, an "enhanced lethality round" as you call it can do nothing BUT help you in court. You see, if the person you shoot lives, they can cause you no end of troubles in court. If they die and you had good reason for shooting them (like you were being threatened with a knife/gun/etc), then they cannot cause you nearly so many problems.
Another thing.... If he is still a threat after 6 rounds, he could:
1) Be hopped up on drugs. Many people have been known to keep coming after people empty entire clips into their center body mass when they were loaded with certain drugs.
2) Be wearing very heavy clothing, which can plug the hollowpoints and limit their expansion, lessening their effectiveness.
3) (In the case that your target is not a mugger, but someone else shooting at you, etc) Be far enough away to make accurate aim with a very small pistol very difficult. It is much more difficult to hold a tight group at 50 ft. with a 2" barrel than it is with something like a 1911 or a decent revolver. However, a 1911 or a decent revolver is much more difficult to conceal well while carrying comfortably.
Anyone who took the time to get a gun would be able to shoot it.
In some states one simply walks in, hands over a certain amount of money to a clerk, fills out a form, and as soon as they pass the background check, they have a concealed carry license, and can go into any gun store and buy a gun same-day. A person could easily do this never having fired even a cap gun, much less any type of firearm. Remember every state in the US has its own set of firearms laws, especially with regards to concealed carry.
Just remember that shooting someone in the back is NOT neccessarily a crime, and very well may still be self-defense. If they are running away, it is certainly not self-defense. But if they are near to you, and turn, there may be any number of things they are doing which would warrant shooting them in the back. The primary BadThing they may be up to is reaching for a weapon, or turning around to look for an object to use as a weapon. I will quote someone else here (I suspect he would wish to remain anonymous, so I will respect those suspected wishes):
"There are many, many cases where an assailant shot in the back is
not 'running away'. It is 'folk forensics' that this means 'running
away'. For one example, an assailant turning to retrieve a dropped
weapon could easily be shot in the back. An assailant might not
know where the citizen has taken cover, and is looking away from him.
This is not an honor-killing in a duel, you know. This is preserving
one's life, one's family's life, and their property, and property is
condensed life-energy. Shooting a thug in the back is a GOOD PLAN,
because it is SAFER."
I carry a.380, also loaded with hydra-shoks. Anyone ever tries to mug me, they'll get approx $5.40 + tax in the form of 12 loud banging sounds and 1080 grains (total) of lead and copper in their center body mass.
This is based on a price of $11.25 + tax for a box of 25 hydra-shoks, which for.380 are 90-grain. This does not include the opportunity cost of the time it takes me to clean my gun later. The 12 rounds are not from an illegal magazine (or even a pre-ban high-cap magazine), simply from 2 6-round mags (one in the gun, the other easily accessible for quick changing action).
If anyone's interested, my gun is a Kel-Tec P3AT, great for easy/lightweight concealment. I highly recommend them.
No, really, think about it... there's this little invention called a timer. They tend to put them on even fairly low-end cameras now. If she can afford a Ninja, she can probably afford a camera with a timer. My guess is that even in Russia, the clock and the camera might have gotten together one night, and with the help of a few shots of stoli, a little camera+timer might have been born.
That's so fucking annoying. Stop it.
About the only thing worse is adding "Thanks for playing."
bzzzzzzzt. WRONG!
I'd have to say there's much worse things, like ACs trying to tell me off. Now go crawl back into the slime from whence thou camest. Oh, and I almost forgot: Thanks for playing!
Of course, that was all before we decided to drop everything and go after Saddam Hussein... now we've given them a nice breather to start working on finding that loose nuke again. (sigh)
bzzzzzzzt. WRONG! We didn't drop everything to go after Saddam... we're still in Afghanistan, it's just not the latest thing so it never gets covered by the media.
without powered RFID "chips", you can't really boost the range of RFID.
Not to be difficult, but yes you most certainly can. All it takes is a much more sensitive directional antenna on the receiver, much like a good directional 802.11b antenna pointed at a plain old crappy laptop card with built-in antenna will significantly boost the range. It has better reception as well as transmission capabilities.
Without going into too much detail, I have personally witnessed a device capable of reading and retransmitting the signal generated by a RFID-type device from quite a distance.
Standard location? In my mind, the "standard" location for a file is where Debian puts it, and I get confused when it's located somewhere else in another distribution.:-)
I tend to think of the "standard" location as being where I can find a file on better than 75% of the *nix systems I've used (Several linux distros, BSDs, HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, etc). But whatever makes a person happy I suppose. For a linux distro, I'd say the standard location should be where the LSB says it is, which from what I've seen Slackware tends to follow a lot closer than Debian.
I get the sense that you're used to installing things via "configure; make; make install". It's good to have a simple method like that available, but when I talk about maintainability of a system, installing non-packaged software is one of the biggest ways to hurt that maintainability. Files created by a "make install" usually don't have any way to cleanly remove or upgrade them; you can upgrade by installing a new version over the old, but if the old version included any files that were removed in the new version, you still have that cruft sitting around. You get the idea.
Actually, I typically install things via "installpkg ---.tgz" and upgrading things via "upgradepkg ---.tgz". When I install from source, I use "configure; make; checkinstall 'make install'". This makes a package out of it that I can easily install, remove, upgrade, whatever I want.
As far as philosophy goes, well, I think you're well on your way to proving my point with your small dissertation on democracy and voting.
To be honest (and here I'll get philosophical), I think the democracy thing may be part of what's (IMO) wrong with Debian... the masses are often wrong, and most of the people in the masses will never known an entire distribution as intimately as, say, Pat knows Slackware. Therefore things take longer to get fixed, the whole process gets bogged down, and the distribution suffers because of it. I have known people using Debian Unstable who have had things like SSH stop working properly upon 'apt-get dist-upgrade' or whatever the command is. Meanwhile, I am almost always running slackware-current (aka the unstable, in-development branch of slack), and have never once had these problems in the several years I've been using slack.
It's going to be hard to say this without people getting their panties in a knot, but I absolutely hate trying to 1) get debian systems running how I want and 2) keep them running how I want.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like if some of the Debian folk spent as much time fixing their distribution as they do ranting about the philosophy behind their system, it could just about literally jump into my computer, read my mind, and magically do everything I wanted without me touching a keyboard. As it is though, I'm forever saying to myself "now where the hell did they put THAT file, since it's not in its standard location..." and "what version is this package really? It looks like version 3.1 from 2 years ago.... no wait, that's 3.1-15... wtf is the -15? It has features that weren't released until 3.9? Huh?!??" and similar.
I once made the mistake of trying to figure out what flags were being used to compile a Debian package... after jumping around through about 7 different intertwined and slightly obfuscated shell scripts for about an hour, I gave up.
Unfortunately, I'm still stuck using Debian on one server (the owner doesn't want to change OSs), but I've gone to Slackware on all my systems. Much simpler system to deal with overall, IMNSHO.
And what if those techs can't get it the sound to work either? I've been involved with linux for nearly a decade, and I still have problems with sound cards. Hell, that's what I bought a Mac for!
If the techs are in charge of rolling out a linux solution, they will make sure they have hardware that works in every way they need it to. Many in the corporate world probably wouldn't really care if their users didn't have sound. That's why before sound was integrated on most dell, compaq, etc motherboards, corporate systems were usually ordered without sound. They simply didn't need it, didn't want it, didn't care if their users didn't have it. If a coroporation really wants/needs a user to have sound and the onboard crap doesn't work, they can go out and buy any of a couple dozen cards ranging from $10 (or less) up, and have them work flawlessly out of the box, autodetected by any recent version of linux running hotplug.
I have occasionally had problems with sound cards in linux. These usually persisted months or years, until I came across something worth listening to and actually cared enough to get it working. In those cases, I usually had it working within a few minutes time and never had to touch the settings on that box again. In a couple cases where I was getting crappy onboard (and fairly new) chipsets working, I had to download a beta version of a driver. Big deal. Sound != desktop useability.
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RE: Anonymous call rejection. You're right that US cell carriers (at least to the best of my knowledge) don't offer anon. call rejection, but some (many?) phones offer it. My first cell phone (Nokia 6150, back in '98) offered this. My newer phone (Sanyo 8100) does not. So this is probably something you would want to look at on the specific phones you are interested in. My guess is that any Nokia phone will have this feature, while others may or may not. LG phones also have a fairly nice/featureful UI (I had an LG 5350 for a while), but in my experience they aren't as well-made (I went through about 5 of them before Sprint finally gave me the Sanyo 8100 for free).
If in the US, see Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act, specifically making this illegal. Not changing oil the oil at all could void your warranty, but changing it yourself most certainly will not.
It *IS* another sales tactic. The employee is there to make sales. A good customer recognizes and expects this. But while the employee is there to make a sale, they are not there to be rude. Using a sales tactic to try to sell a service plan is not a bad thing. Using it repeatedly after the service plan has been declined *is* a bad thing. Therein lies the difference.
If you work in customer service and you believe that harassing customers about crap like PSPs is the proper way of going about your job, you seriously need a new job. I've worked in customer service for over 6 years, and now manage a store. If any of my employees ever treated a customer the way I'm reading in this thread about Best Buy customers being treated, that employee would be thrown out on their ass in no time at all.
Customer service is NOT customer harassment. They are two very different things. Good customer service/salesmanship is saying "we also have an extended service plan available which gives you these extra benefits (lists benefits). Would you be interested in finding out more about that?" Then, if the plan is well presented in a curteous manner, the customer may be interested in finding out more, and the sales rep can tell them more and get them signed up. If on the other hand the person doesn't want it, a good customer service/sales rep will back off, sell them the product, find out if there are any other items they may need ("do you need any cables to get that hooked up?" or "especially since you won't be covered by the extended service plan, you should be aware that the biggest killer of these widgets is power surges... do you have a quality surge supressor or UPS?"). Then the customer leaves well informed and having made a purchase, but feeling as though they were helped by a truly caring person instead of feeling harassed and pushed into buying something they didn't want.
You say you "see people all the time who enjoy getting pissed off at customer reps." Did you ever stop to consider that probably many of them have good reason? Yes I get the occasional inconsolable asshole in my store, but I probably have at most 1 or 2 pissed off customers every month.
All in all, customer service is what you make of it, and customers will typically treat employees much as they are treated by the employee. If the customers are treated with respect, they will typically treat the employees with respect. If the rep is rude and pushy, the customer will also be rude and pushy, to an extreme.
Flying J also charges for access... it may appear as an open AP, but did you actually connect to one and use it successfully without paying? That is the true test, as most open APs have some sort of device behind them authenticating users or in some way restricting access.
As far as truckers requiring high-quality wireless, remember that many of them are away from home at days or weeks at a time... What better way to stay in touch with people than email? Especially when they can pull into a Flying J and connect easily from the comfort of their cab.
Better yet... weigh an empty gas can. Fill it with gas from the pump. Record the amount the pump says has been pumped. Find a very accurate weight for gasoline, and some very accurate scales. Weigh the gas can once full, and subtract the empty weight. Calculate amount of gas based off the weight.
It seems to me that it may be easier to find accurate scales than an adequately sized accurate graduated container, not to mention the results may be more accurate.
Disney has been using this launch method for their fireworks for years. I remember visiting disneyland in elementary school (10+ years ago) and reading about their launch method, and this is the same system they were using then. Unique, yes. Kinda cool, yes. Possibly easier to choreograph than traditional BP-launched fireworks also. But still, nothing terribly new.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The enemy of my enemy is my ally. Not neccessarily my friend.
I realize this is complete and utter rubbish flamebait I'm responding to, but these are two totally seperate animals you're talking about. "Windows" (as in MS Windows), is a very generic word used to describe a graphical, _windowed_ operating system. The term "window manager" and "window system" are generic, used by graphical OSs since before the time of MS Windows. I wouldn't say Lindows is a parody, either. Possibly it is part parody, but it is fitting; it brings to mind a Linux-based OS which behaves similarly to MS Windows. (ie it is a windowed operating system)
Moore's title-theft, however, is different. First point of difference: Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which paper burns, which is integral to the movie. Fahrenheit 9/11 makes reference to the movie content with the "9/11" part, but what does "Fahrenheit" have to do with anything? Because there was a fire in the buildings? woohoo. It's not integral to the theme of the movie that there was a fire. The movie is political propaganda, designed by a skilled lier to attempt to sway an election. To mistake it as anything more significant is folly. That no one has taken Moore out in the streets and publicly flogged him for idiocy and for lying to the public through his agitpropumentaries is telling of the sad state of our society.
If you take two identical PCs, load Mandrake 10 on one, and Slackware 10 on the other, have the same window manager and everything else, you'll definitely see a difference in that Mandrake 10 has a MUCH faster feel.
This probably has quite a lot to do with the Mandrake builds being optimized for i686 while the slack builds are optimized for i486. This may make slack a bit more sluggish in some situations, but it also means I can grab an old 486 dx25 laptop, throw a very basic install of slack on it, and use it for network stuffs with no problems at all. This is definately something not doable with Mandrake.
And I might add that anyone fairly skilled in electronics design can build a decently long-range RFID reader/retransmitter, so why anyone would rely on something RFID based for anything remotely sensitive is far beyond me. I would think the only even remotely secure way of doing this would be to use something like bluetooth with an encrypted number and rotating key scheme or something. This would at least be marginally harder to crack.
A small snippet from the slackware-current ChangeLog.txt:
"I also noticed that the ATI Radeon binary drivers designed for XFree86 4.3.0 do not work with XFree86 4.4.0, but do work with the X.Org release."
Full ChangeLog.txt is available here, for those who are interested. The XFree86 to X.Org change is toward the bottom of the entry for Sun May 30 01:06:39 PDT 2004.
Actually, in a reasonable jursidiction, one won't even go before a court for acting in self-defense. If they do, it will be very brief.
Also, an "enhanced lethality round" as you call it can do nothing BUT help you in court. You see, if the person you shoot lives, they can cause you no end of troubles in court. If they die and you had good reason for shooting them (like you were being threatened with a knife/gun/etc), then they cannot cause you nearly so many problems.
Another thing.... If he is still a threat after 6 rounds, he could:
1) Be hopped up on drugs. Many people have been known to keep coming after people empty entire clips into their center body mass when they were loaded with certain drugs.
2) Be wearing very heavy clothing, which can plug the hollowpoints and limit their expansion, lessening their effectiveness.
3) (In the case that your target is not a mugger, but someone else shooting at you, etc) Be far enough away to make accurate aim with a very small pistol very difficult. It is much more difficult to hold a tight group at 50 ft. with a 2" barrel than it is with something like a 1911 or a decent revolver. However, a 1911 or a decent revolver is much more difficult to conceal well while carrying comfortably.
Anyone who took the time to get a gun would be able to shoot it.
In some states one simply walks in, hands over a certain amount of money to a clerk, fills out a form, and as soon as they pass the background check, they have a concealed carry license, and can go into any gun store and buy a gun same-day. A person could easily do this never having fired even a cap gun, much less any type of firearm. Remember every state in the US has its own set of firearms laws, especially with regards to concealed carry.
Just remember that shooting someone in the back is NOT neccessarily a crime, and very well may still be self-defense. If they are running away, it is certainly not self-defense. But if they are near to you, and turn, there may be any number of things they are doing which would warrant shooting them in the back. The primary BadThing they may be up to is reaching for a weapon, or turning around to look for an object to use as a weapon. I will quote someone else here (I suspect he would wish to remain anonymous, so I will respect those suspected wishes):
"There are many, many cases where an assailant shot in the back is not 'running away'. It is 'folk forensics' that this means 'running away'. For one example, an assailant turning to retrieve a dropped weapon could easily be shot in the back. An assailant might not know where the citizen has taken cover, and is looking away from him. This is not an honor-killing in a duel, you know. This is preserving one's life, one's family's life, and their property, and property is condensed life-energy. Shooting a thug in the back is a GOOD PLAN, because it is SAFER."
I carry a .380, also loaded with hydra-shoks. Anyone ever tries to mug me, they'll get approx $5.40 + tax in the form of 12 loud banging sounds and 1080 grains (total) of lead and copper in their center body mass.
.380 are 90-grain. This does not include the opportunity cost of the time it takes me to clean my gun later. The 12 rounds are not from an illegal magazine (or even a pre-ban high-cap magazine), simply from 2 6-round mags (one in the gun, the other easily accessible for quick changing action).
This is based on a price of $11.25 + tax for a box of 25 hydra-shoks, which for
If anyone's interested, my gun is a Kel-Tec P3AT, great for easy/lightweight concealment. I highly recommend them.
It may be racist, but it's not prejudice. There's a big difference. Think about it.
Not even the cops carry fireamrs.
Good. So who's gonna stop him? That makes the gun idea even better.
Who took the pictures with her in them?
In Soviet Russia, the pictures take you.
No, really, think about it... there's this little invention called a timer. They tend to put them on even fairly low-end cameras now. If she can afford a Ninja, she can probably afford a camera with a timer. My guess is that even in Russia, the clock and the camera might have gotten together one night, and with the help of a few shots of stoli, a little camera+timer might have been born.
That's so fucking annoying. Stop it. About the only thing worse is adding "Thanks for playing."
bzzzzzzzt. WRONG!
I'd have to say there's much worse things, like ACs trying to tell me off. Now go crawl back into the slime from whence thou camest. Oh, and I almost forgot: Thanks for playing!
Of course, that was all before we decided to drop everything and go after Saddam Hussein... now we've given them a nice breather to start working on finding that loose nuke again. (sigh)
bzzzzzzzt. WRONG! We didn't drop everything to go after Saddam... we're still in Afghanistan, it's just not the latest thing so it never gets covered by the media.
without powered RFID "chips", you can't really boost the range of RFID.
Not to be difficult, but yes you most certainly can. All it takes is a much more sensitive directional antenna on the receiver, much like a good directional 802.11b antenna pointed at a plain old crappy laptop card with built-in antenna will significantly boost the range. It has better reception as well as transmission capabilities.
Without going into too much detail, I have personally witnessed a device capable of reading and retransmitting the signal generated by a RFID-type device from quite a distance.
Standard location? In my mind, the "standard" location for a file is where Debian puts it, and I get confused when it's located somewhere else in another distribution. :-)
I tend to think of the "standard" location as being where I can find a file on better than 75% of the *nix systems I've used (Several linux distros, BSDs, HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, etc). But whatever makes a person happy I suppose. For a linux distro, I'd say the standard location should be where the LSB says it is, which from what I've seen Slackware tends to follow a lot closer than Debian.
I get the sense that you're used to installing things via "configure; make; make install". It's good to have a simple method like that available, but when I talk about maintainability of a system, installing non-packaged software is one of the biggest ways to hurt that maintainability. Files created by a "make install" usually don't have any way to cleanly remove or upgrade them; you can upgrade by installing a new version over the old, but if the old version included any files that were removed in the new version, you still have that cruft sitting around. You get the idea.
Actually, I typically install things via "installpkg ---.tgz" and upgrading things via "upgradepkg ---.tgz". When I install from source, I use "configure; make; checkinstall 'make install'". This makes a package out of it that I can easily install, remove, upgrade, whatever I want.
As far as philosophy goes, well, I think you're well on your way to proving my point with your small dissertation on democracy and voting.
To be honest (and here I'll get philosophical), I think the democracy thing may be part of what's (IMO) wrong with Debian... the masses are often wrong, and most of the people in the masses will never known an entire distribution as intimately as, say, Pat knows Slackware. Therefore things take longer to get fixed, the whole process gets bogged down, and the distribution suffers because of it. I have known people using Debian Unstable who have had things like SSH stop working properly upon 'apt-get dist-upgrade' or whatever the command is. Meanwhile, I am almost always running slackware-current (aka the unstable, in-development branch of slack), and have never once had these problems in the several years I've been using slack.
It's going to be hard to say this without people getting their panties in a knot, but I absolutely hate trying to 1) get debian systems running how I want and 2) keep them running how I want.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like if some of the Debian folk spent as much time fixing their distribution as they do ranting about the philosophy behind their system, it could just about literally jump into my computer, read my mind, and magically do everything I wanted without me touching a keyboard. As it is though, I'm forever saying to myself "now where the hell did they put THAT file, since it's not in its standard location..." and "what version is this package really? It looks like version 3.1 from 2 years ago.... no wait, that's 3.1-15... wtf is the -15? It has features that weren't released until 3.9? Huh?!??" and similar.
I once made the mistake of trying to figure out what flags were being used to compile a Debian package... after jumping around through about 7 different intertwined and slightly obfuscated shell scripts for about an hour, I gave up.
Unfortunately, I'm still stuck using Debian on one server (the owner doesn't want to change OSs), but I've gone to Slackware on all my systems. Much simpler system to deal with overall, IMNSHO.
And what if those techs can't get it the sound to work either? I've been involved with linux for nearly a decade, and I still have problems with sound cards. Hell, that's what I bought a Mac for!
If the techs are in charge of rolling out a linux solution, they will make sure they have hardware that works in every way they need it to. Many in the corporate world probably wouldn't really care if their users didn't have sound. That's why before sound was integrated on most dell, compaq, etc motherboards, corporate systems were usually ordered without sound. They simply didn't need it, didn't want it, didn't care if their users didn't have it. If a coroporation really wants/needs a user to have sound and the onboard crap doesn't work, they can go out and buy any of a couple dozen cards ranging from $10 (or less) up, and have them work flawlessly out of the box, autodetected by any recent version of linux running hotplug.
I have occasionally had problems with sound cards in linux. These usually persisted months or years, until I came across something worth listening to and actually cared enough to get it working. In those cases, I usually had it working within a few minutes time and never had to touch the settings on that box again. In a couple cases where I was getting crappy onboard (and fairly new) chipsets working, I had to download a beta version of a driver. Big deal. Sound != desktop useability.