Dude, when you're stuck as the NASCAR-luvin' redneck, or the bible-thumping zealot, or as the serial killer (every damned last one of them), then I'll cry you a river. But can you help me with my homework? Okay, just kidding. But are asians always the sidekicks now? Jackie Chan is always either the star or an equal half of a buddy arrangement, and Chow Yun Fat (is that his name?) is the main character in his movies. I agree that you're typecast, but Hollywood isn't known for complex, nuanced characters. They're going to play it safe. You can't have the full range of character development if you aren't willing to be the stupid guy or the bad guy once in a while. Would the asian activist groups (there have to be some out there, I'm guessing) be okay with an asian serial killer? Child molester/murderer? Really stupid guy? Or would they decry negative stereotypes?
I worked with a woman who looked (to everyone) Filipino, but she identified as black. Her husband, Filipino, kept his mouth shut when we asked him about it. She said she was black, because apparently she has an ancestor who is black (or mixed race, in all likelihood) and that's what she chose to identify as. I know mixed-race people who identify as white or as latino depending on who they're hanging out with that day. If I remember correctly from a vapid interview I read with Christina Aguillera, she considers herself a "woman of color" even though she looks about as white as I do. Race is now as much about self-perception, maybe even more, than it is about the perception of others.
I follow the environmentalist movement, and even the left in general, a bit, and I'm not that familiar with these anticapitalists you speak of. They exist, certainly, but the idea that they run the left-wing is a bit exaggerated. One of my favorite lefty documentaries is The Corporation, and what's relevant here is that the charge usually voiced is that the film is anti-capitalism. Instead, it's actually anti-free-from-accountability-corporations, if you'll pardon an ugly hyphenation. Selling stuff at a profit isn't considered evil, ergo capitalism isn't considered evil. What's considered evil is the insualtion corporations enjoy from responsibility, or rather the insulation investors and businesspeople enjoy from responsibility for the decisions they made along the way to making a buck.
Attacking the idea that multinational corporations should be given the legal status of human beings, but not the responsibilities of human beings, does not constitute an attack on capitalism. Many people are faulting the left for a position it doesn't generally have (with a few outright communist examples) because, let's face it, the message "we oppose them because they want shareholders to be held responsible for what they profit from" isn't going to sell as well as "they hate capitalism!" This is about as cogent a criticism as saying that Republican Senators who want to debate the Iraq war are trying to help the terrorists. It's an attempt to front-load the argument with the assumption that the criticis of corporate unaccountability actually want to attack capitalism itself.
You know, some people choose their work computer based on the applications they need.
Firefox, Openoffice, Texmaker, Google Earth, Abiword, Scribus, and Inkscape are available for all three platforms. Screen, midnight commander, and pdftk are probably available on Windows via Cygwin, and I'd guess on OS X as well. Media players are available for all. My application needs can be met by any of these three platforms. So actually it does come down to ease of use, to include ease of security, program installation, etc.
I don't own a Mac and I don't claim to be an expert, but from fiddling with them in the store, and having used Windows forever, I like Gnome under Linux better interface-wise. But I don't mind the occasional command-line use, and I'm not an uber-creative type who thrives on aesthetics. I don't like outright ugly stuff, but my ugly-meter is probably less sensitive than that of an artist. If I could buy a commercial version of Ubuntu with native DVD playing (encrypted, I mean), all the video codecs, and my sound worked, I'd be happy. But I will, as I said, get a Mac Mini as a media computer so I can play movies without having to deal too heavily with the computer stuff.
Mainstreet USA will help shovel every last manufacturing job to China (or Bangladesh, or India, or...) out of an obsession over low prices. Q-tips could cost a dime more but keep jobs in the USA, and American shoppers would still shop at Wal-Mart to save that dime, jobs be damned. Just as the Republican Party has co-opted Evangelical Christianity, Wal-Mart has co-opted flag-waving American consumerism, and each are now synonymous with something that they really have very little, if anything, in common with. But for low prices, grandmas in American would gladly harvest your kidneys, and if they simultaneously killed the very last American manufacturing job and doomed the entire non-suit-wearing population to minimum wage, they wouldn't care one bit. They'd just keep watching O'Reilly and listening to Paul Harvey, and any criticism of their actions would be brushed aside. Your pessimism is not nearly bleak enough. I hope I helped.
Low prices are definitely a draw. But over time I've managed to wean myself from Wal-Mart and shop locally, and I buy "made in USA" if I can find it. I'd rather pay a bit more and live in a country where people can find jobs at a decent wage, than a country where everything is dirt cheap but made in China or Bangladesh and everyone works for minimum wage at Wal-Mart. Actually the convenience is, for me, more addictive than the prices. I'm not completely broke so I can afford a few more bucks at the register if it'll keep jobs in the USA, but having to make multiple trips all over town for items I can buy at 2AM at Wal-Mart is frustrating. But the internets are always open, so I spend far more money online than I do in person in stores.
Who the hell is going to go into the terminal just to install something?... Windows: Double-click install.exe... OS X: Drag program icon to 'Applications'
Who the hell is going to Google for the project homepage, figure out a different webpage for every program, download the installation file, and then double click or drag, just to install something? You must be crazy. "sudo apt-get install " is MUCH faster than all those other steps. How do I upgrade a program, much less twenty of them, on my Windows box? I have to go to each program's homepage, again, download the.exe file, again, and install it, again, often after having to manually uninstall the old version. With the command line? "Sudo apt-get update" followed by "sudo apt-get upgrade". Since when is the typing of those words harder than the Windows way? I haven't run OSX yet, so I can't speak of that.
I readily admit there are are things I envy about OSX, which is why I'll buy a Mac Mini in a few months to use as a media computer. But I doubt that I'll buy a Mac as my work computer, because I like Synaptic and apt-get so much. Synaptic may be the "preferred" way but I can copy/paste "sudo apt-get install program1 program2 program3 program4" from a text file. It can, I assume, be scripted. No, I'm not leet enough to be that good with the command line, and I couldn't use it exclusively, but don't disrespect the terminal, because the terminal can beat the hell out of your gui in many ways.
The Pavlov method would feed them every time a bell sounded, and it would get messy because there would be drool everywhere. More like a preschool than a grade school. You're thinking of the Milgram method, but for accuracy you'd have the kids shock each other when a teacher told them to. Also in the bag o' tricks is the Zimbardo method, which they get to use when they grow up, join the Army, and work in a secret prison in Iraq.
No, these laws are intended to reinforce the puritanical idea that sex outside of marriage is wrong. They are also intended to give parents a club to use against boyfriends they want to get rid of. Yes, evil trenchcoat-wearing pedophiles were the pretext used to get the ball rolling, just as evil terrorists were used to get the ball rolling for the Patriot Act and other powers on the government's wishlist. Most sexual abuse occurs in the home, yet strangely the most draconian laws apply to those outside the home.
So you're just saying that it's more profitable to pollute. No kidding. It's also cheaper to ignore health and safety regulations, ignore fire code when building the factory, use slave labor, murder your competition, and so on, but we generally recognize that profit does not justify everything. We don't tolerate sociopathic activity in individuals, and we shouldn't tolerate it in corporations just because someone wants to make a buck. Just because it's cheaper for me, more profitable for my business model, to dump the toxic chemicals from my factory onto your land, into your air for your children to breathe, doesn't make it okay. I shouldn't be able to pollute your land and cause respiratory problems for your kids to make a profit, and if cleaning up my toxic waste means that my business model is no longer tenable, then that's too bad; I just just find another business model.
6) End Socialism. Economic prosperity will allow people to adjust to the changing climate better. More socialism is more death and misery.
The USA, Australia, and I think Japan are the world's worst polluters per capita. They aren't socialist. Pollution is pollution, consumption is consumption, and the economic model used by the polluter has no bearing on the toxicity of their toxins.
7) "repeal" Kyoto protocols. They don't work, they are counter productive, they will cause more global warming.
How would we repeal it? The USA didn't ratify Kyoto, nor are we abiding by it, in either the letter or spirit. The USA is still the single largest polluter per capita.
Global Warming the religion: Claim scientific proof of man's influence on the environment to change ECONOMIC conditions.
The only people using the word "proof" are the ones trying to debunk global warming. "Proof" only exists in mathematics, and the word does not apply to science. The preponderance of the evidence has convinced the scientific community (of climatologists) that global warming is largely anthropocentric. That does not constitute a religion, myth, dogma, creed, or even tenet. It's just the consensus of the scientific community. And are you saying that man has no influence on the environment? That would make man the only living creature whose actions had no effect on its evironment--all life affects its environment, and is capable of rendering its environment unfit for its own continued survival.
The effect is to transfer large amounts of my money to unelected officials to spend as they wish "to help the third world". Bunk
The article isn't talking about your money. But even if it was, let's look at that idea. Your money. Do you own an automobile? If so, the exhaust of your vehicle is toxic, and causes pollution that causes thousands of asthma deaths every year, lost workdays due to bronchitis and other respiratory ailments. Exhaust from your vehicle creates pollution that lowers my quality of life, and can even affect property value once a city is known for having bad air. When you start paying the full cost of driving your vehicle, you might get some sympathy. Right now, oil companies and auto companies want you to think that your responsibility ends with driving, but shouldn't you be responsible for the results of your choices? I'm not talking about the spotted owl or some endangered slug--I'm talking about some six-year-old who is having an asthma attack because of air pollution directly resulting from auto exhaust. But let me guess--you aren't responsible, no one who drives is responsible, and dammit we better not raise your taxes to deal with air pollution because that's just crazy environazi fantasy talk. Right.
Linux provides people with total control over their systems while making the most simple of tasks take ten times longer than they should;
Actually Linux (Ubuntu in my case) is much faster (as far as getting things done) than Windows, at least for me. Installing stuff is much easier, via Synaptic and apt-get. Even installing the printer was faster, since I didn't need to hunt down a driver disk. The problem with Linux is the lack of vendor support. Sometimes you can tweak, compile, change versions, and so on, and that takes a frustrating amount of time and effort. My current installation is Ubuntu and I love the interface, love Synaptic and apt-get, love Kile and Texmaker and k3b. But my next computer will probably be a Mac Mini, because I want/need a media computer and right now my sound just doesn't work right, despite hours of googling and trying to fix it. It's just frustrating to have to give up everything else I like about Linux just so I know my hardware will work correctly without expending time and brainpower.
Sadly, when people like a company's products, they tend to forget that the company isn't innately good (or innately anything) but is ultimately devoted to financial profit. I remember a scene from Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Marlowe is about to go off to Africa, and an old woman at the firm can talk only of bringing the light of religion to the poor benighted savages. Marlowe tries to intimate that the company might be run for profit, but she won't hear anything of it--she prefers the messianic, benevolent illusion over the money-grubbing reality. It's sad how we get emotionally bound up in something as silly as a computer/software company and blind ourselves to what we can plainly see. Apple makes good gear and they don't currently practice human sacrifice, but not much else can definitively be said about them or about any other company.
Not all desktops are Linux-friendly, either. My Sony something-or-other has an Intel soundcard chipset (also commonly used in laptops, sadly) that ALSA seems to dislike intensely. My sound level is about a quarter of what it should be. I've googled the hell out of the problem and there isn't a fix yet, at least that I can find. I've even installed the latest ALSA manually, and no dice. I've tried sound on Ubuntu 6.04, 6.10, Knoppix, DSL, Puppy, DreamLinux, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, and Suse, and the outcome is the same, meaning very, very quiet, so I guess I'll just wait (quietly) for the fix to magically appear, assuming it does. Eventually I'll probably buy a Mac Mini to serve as a media computer. For desktop use, I really love Ubuntu, and if my sound worked properly I'd consider it perfect.
The high executive pay isn't the entire picture. In a culture that pays an exec $400 million in severance pay, there are also expense accounts, fine art in the lobby, jets, and all the other accoutrements of that degree of wealth. And despite your condescension, it is less than obvious that sky-high executive pay has nothing at all to do with the quality of life of the little guy. I don't necessarily think that legislation is the answer--if CEOs and boards of directors want to pay themselves tens of millons of dollars and everyone else minimum wage, that's a character issue, a human decency issue, more than a legal issue. I'm just bothered that we have turned that kind of attitude into a virtue. If the Enron guys had been acquitted, they'd be admired now because getting our own, even at everyone else's expense, is a core value of our culture.
The goal used to be to make money. Now the goal is to make as much money as possible. Though those seem like similar goals, in reality they aren't. Before, as long as you were making money then you could, with a good conscience, treat your employees well. Now, no matter how much money you're making, you still can't treat your employees well and feel good about it, because every cent spent on human decency is a cent of profit squandered. Also, many companies of old felt that they had a responsibility to their workers, whereas now workers are viewed as an expense, like paper clips or toilet paper. This attitude makes for a hotter stock price, but a worse quality of life for everyone who works there.
Also, CEO pay has skyrocketed in comparison to worker pay, and no company that pays hundreds of millions of dollars to departing executives can also afford to be loyal and supportive to the workers. In the corporate culture of today, executives are seen as the movers and shakers, the visionaries who create the value, while the workers are seen as expenses.
I lived in the UK (Lakenheath) from 90-93. I loved the cathedrals and castles, and the weather didn't bother me. I still remember trying to get to work and getting stuck behind a carrot truck, though. If you think the UK is expensive to travel in, try Japan. At least you can drive around your country, unlike the US which is just enormous. Fuel is much cheaper in the US, but everything is so spread out, unless you confine your travels to one region.
I guess it is different visiting somewhere than being a native. When I was visiting SE Asia I was very self-conscious about being the only American. But after being around other people I didn't feel so bad. I think the problem is that our own countries reflect on us, and the problems of other countries don't bother us too much. When I was in SE Asia I saw a man slap the hell out of a woman on the street. I found it shocking but I would have been more upset, and in a different way, if he had been an American. Same with our current President. If another head of state displays his, shall we say, intellectual capacity, it's just amusing, but if it's my President then I want to hide under the table. I guess everyone's like that. I wonder if I'll get modded "troll" again for saying that all is not sweetness and light in the USA. What's with people and the troll modding?
Being from the USA, I've always been puzzled that people visit my country. We have Yellowstone National Park (for now, anyway), the Grand Canyon, and some other beautiful scenery, but politics aside, the country is too big. The middle is essentially empty. It's too expensive to get a hotel room, too expensive to travel, and when you add in the political climate, borderline xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, the fact that so many people are armed to the teeth and don't like foreigners, and so on, I can't figure out what makes it so attractive. I understand the point of emigrating from Cuba or Myanmar or even Mexico, but why visit? I'm not saying that the entire country is a disaster, only that I myself, after living outside the country for several years, don't feel safe there anymore, am aghast at the political environment, and am basically embarrassed by much of what goes on there. If I was your guide, I wouldn't know where to take you. But maybe I'm reading too much into it, and everyone feels more or less the same way about their own country. There is probably a lot of chauvanism in my outlook. I cringe around hicks in my own country, but illiterate farmers in, say, Thailand don't bother me in the least. Too much self-consciousness, I guess. I know we don't have a monopoly on jerks or idiots, but sometimes it feels like we have all the Grade-A specimens.
Sadly, not everyone has your aptitude. I certainly don't, which sucks because I am interested in the field. I just don't get it. I lasted a week or two into Calculus I and had to drop it. I was able to memorize a few processes, but I never understood them. At best people like me can use mathematical formulas to find an answer, but that isn't the same as understanding something.
Stories like yours make me glad I wasn't smart enough to hang with CS. I lasted through one week of Calculus I and realized I had to change majors. Math hates me.
Stories like yours are why I decided to not go into the IT field. I like computers, and I like using them as tools, but people are beyond my ken. Are they stupid? No, they aren't--computers are just too complex to understand unless you are interested and want to learn, and even then a willingness to learn won't help you instantaneously fix a problem. And even so, I tell people all the time to backup their files, to be wary of what they download, to run spybot and virus software, but people largely ignore me until their college paper is eaten by MS Word, or their digital pics vanish, and then I can't help them. It's frustrating, because I know what would help them (in the future, not right now), but I'm not going to start yammering about external USB drives and LaTeX and Openoffice and Partimage and Knoppix and all the other seemingly (to me) obvious, easy things they could change to make their lives better computer-wise. Because their coming to me with a problem only means they want the problem fixed, not that they want to learn anything. Took me quite a while to learn that. But in your case they've already enrolled in a class, so maybe (hopefully) your experience is more positive.
90% market dominance isn't just a result of good marketing, it's the primary "feature" of windows. Nothing else will be able to offer that feature by definition.
No indeed, that market share isn't from good marketing. It came from contracts forbidding computer sellers from offering competing operating systems. MS didn't get that marketshare by building a better mousetrap, understanding the market, understanding the users, or learning the sound of one hand clapping--they just made sure that customers didn't have any other options, by locking Dell, Packard Bell, and other companies into contracts where they could only ship computers with Windows.
This doesn't really translate well to a comparison with the Ipod. To be a valid comparison, Apple would've had to sign contracts with vendors forbidding them from selling any other mp3 players, and that would have to be the reason for their market dominance.
Linux hasn't caught on because 1) it's harder/more complicated, 2) fewer computers (almost none) come with it pre-installed, 3) the shelves and shelves of software in the stores near you contain almost no Linux software, and 4) few companies have a vested interest in pushing Linux. That last one is big. I used to live in Tokyo, and as I walked through Akihabara one evening, I realized that, despite being in the tech capital of the planet, I was seeing no Linux signs at all. There were books, yes, but no 50-ft signs towering over me, no posters lining the stairwells, no bins of Linux CDs, nothing. I couldn't even find it for sale, unless you count the media that came with the books.
But I agree with the other posters that Linux doesn't have to be for everyone. If you take away the command line you've taken away much of what makes Linux powerful, and there wouldn't be much of a point. No pointy-clicky interface will every be as powerful as the command line. I think the fact that over 75% of the world's fastest supercomputers use Linux is more relevant when assessing Linux's value than the consumer market share.
But let's face reality here. They aren't going to risk being ostracized from the community by disagreeing with the MAN-MADE global warming hysteria
I have always found this idea funny, that scientists are in ideological lock-step because to say anything against the dogma would be to ruin their careers. All the while, Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, Hawking, Dirac, and every famous scientist in history got famous by doing the very thing you are saying they can't do for fear of ostracism--rock the boat. Scientists make careers and legacies by rocking the boat. The difference between those famous scientists and your "global warming hysteria" naysayers is that the famous scientists actually did science that produced new theories that fit the facts better than the old theories. Your naysayers aren't doing science or proposing alternative models--they're just rejecting global warming, and accepting accolades from one political faction and money from the oil companies.
The scientific culture does reward mavericks, and thrives on challenges to the status quo, assuming that the person saying "throw out the old theory" has a better theory. But saying "nuh-uh!!!" doesn't quite measure up to that.
I really, really wish the left-wing hadn't gotten to environmentalism first and staked it out as their issue. I sincerely think that much of the resistance to the idea of global warming is that conservatives just don't want to find themselves in agreement with those irritating, smarmy granolaheads. I can sympathize, more or less. I certainly wouldn't want to find myself in agreement with Ann Coulter, much less David Duke. But the idea that anthropocentric global warming is a "liberal" issue is really hurting us, almost as badly as the idea that civil rights are a "liberal" issue.
The harder they crack down on questionable license situations, the more people get pissed of and move to OSS or other solutions. THere is no way that any commercial entity should have this much power. Ford can't show up and make you prove to their satisfaction that you didn't steal your car. If someone showed up and demanded the receipt for the couch you've had for five years, you'd tell them to piss up a rope, and they'd have no power to do anything. THat's the way it should be with software, too. The burden should really by on the BSA to prove your guilt, not on you to prove your innocence. But the more people they strongarm, the more will choose to move to Linux or some other solution that doesn't expose you to the risk of hellacious audits. I wish more businesses would move to OSS, not so it reaches 100% saturation, but just so OSS isn't seen as odd anymore.
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Dude, when you're stuck as the NASCAR-luvin' redneck, or the bible-thumping zealot, or as the serial killer (every damned last one of them), then I'll cry you a river. But can you help me with my homework? Okay, just kidding. But are asians always the sidekicks now? Jackie Chan is always either the star or an equal half of a buddy arrangement, and Chow Yun Fat (is that his name?) is the main character in his movies. I agree that you're typecast, but Hollywood isn't known for complex, nuanced characters. They're going to play it safe. You can't have the full range of character development if you aren't willing to be the stupid guy or the bad guy once in a while. Would the asian activist groups (there have to be some out there, I'm guessing) be okay with an asian serial killer? Child molester/murderer? Really stupid guy? Or would they decry negative stereotypes?
I worked with a woman who looked (to everyone) Filipino, but she identified as black. Her husband, Filipino, kept his mouth shut when we asked him about it. She said she was black, because apparently she has an ancestor who is black (or mixed race, in all likelihood) and that's what she chose to identify as. I know mixed-race people who identify as white or as latino depending on who they're hanging out with that day. If I remember correctly from a vapid interview I read with Christina Aguillera, she considers herself a "woman of color" even though she looks about as white as I do. Race is now as much about self-perception, maybe even more, than it is about the perception of others.
Attacking the idea that multinational corporations should be given the legal status of human beings, but not the responsibilities of human beings, does not constitute an attack on capitalism. Many people are faulting the left for a position it doesn't generally have (with a few outright communist examples) because, let's face it, the message "we oppose them because they want shareholders to be held responsible for what they profit from" isn't going to sell as well as "they hate capitalism!" This is about as cogent a criticism as saying that Republican Senators who want to debate the Iraq war are trying to help the terrorists. It's an attempt to front-load the argument with the assumption that the criticis of corporate unaccountability actually want to attack capitalism itself.
I don't own a Mac and I don't claim to be an expert, but from fiddling with them in the store, and having used Windows forever, I like Gnome under Linux better interface-wise. But I don't mind the occasional command-line use, and I'm not an uber-creative type who thrives on aesthetics. I don't like outright ugly stuff, but my ugly-meter is probably less sensitive than that of an artist. If I could buy a commercial version of Ubuntu with native DVD playing (encrypted, I mean), all the video codecs, and my sound worked, I'd be happy. But I will, as I said, get a Mac Mini as a media computer so I can play movies without having to deal too heavily with the computer stuff.
Mainstreet USA will help shovel every last manufacturing job to China (or Bangladesh, or India, or...) out of an obsession over low prices. Q-tips could cost a dime more but keep jobs in the USA, and American shoppers would still shop at Wal-Mart to save that dime, jobs be damned. Just as the Republican Party has co-opted Evangelical Christianity, Wal-Mart has co-opted flag-waving American consumerism, and each are now synonymous with something that they really have very little, if anything, in common with. But for low prices, grandmas in American would gladly harvest your kidneys, and if they simultaneously killed the very last American manufacturing job and doomed the entire non-suit-wearing population to minimum wage, they wouldn't care one bit. They'd just keep watching O'Reilly and listening to Paul Harvey, and any criticism of their actions would be brushed aside. Your pessimism is not nearly bleak enough. I hope I helped.
Low prices are definitely a draw. But over time I've managed to wean myself from Wal-Mart and shop locally, and I buy "made in USA" if I can find it. I'd rather pay a bit more and live in a country where people can find jobs at a decent wage, than a country where everything is dirt cheap but made in China or Bangladesh and everyone works for minimum wage at Wal-Mart. Actually the convenience is, for me, more addictive than the prices. I'm not completely broke so I can afford a few more bucks at the register if it'll keep jobs in the USA, but having to make multiple trips all over town for items I can buy at 2AM at Wal-Mart is frustrating. But the internets are always open, so I spend far more money online than I do in person in stores.
I readily admit there are are things I envy about OSX, which is why I'll buy a Mac Mini in a few months to use as a media computer. But I doubt that I'll buy a Mac as my work computer, because I like Synaptic and apt-get so much. Synaptic may be the "preferred" way but I can copy/paste "sudo apt-get install program1 program2 program3 program4" from a text file. It can, I assume, be scripted. No, I'm not leet enough to be that good with the command line, and I couldn't use it exclusively, but don't disrespect the terminal, because the terminal can beat the hell out of your gui in many ways.
The Pavlov method would feed them every time a bell sounded, and it would get messy because there would be drool everywhere. More like a preschool than a grade school. You're thinking of the Milgram method, but for accuracy you'd have the kids shock each other when a teacher told them to. Also in the bag o' tricks is the Zimbardo method, which they get to use when they grow up, join the Army, and work in a secret prison in Iraq.
No, these laws are intended to reinforce the puritanical idea that sex outside of marriage is wrong. They are also intended to give parents a club to use against boyfriends they want to get rid of. Yes, evil trenchcoat-wearing pedophiles were the pretext used to get the ball rolling, just as evil terrorists were used to get the ball rolling for the Patriot Act and other powers on the government's wishlist. Most sexual abuse occurs in the home, yet strangely the most draconian laws apply to those outside the home.
So you're just saying that it's more profitable to pollute. No kidding. It's also cheaper to ignore health and safety regulations, ignore fire code when building the factory, use slave labor, murder your competition, and so on, but we generally recognize that profit does not justify everything. We don't tolerate sociopathic activity in individuals, and we shouldn't tolerate it in corporations just because someone wants to make a buck. Just because it's cheaper for me, more profitable for my business model, to dump the toxic chemicals from my factory onto your land, into your air for your children to breathe, doesn't make it okay. I shouldn't be able to pollute your land and cause respiratory problems for your kids to make a profit, and if cleaning up my toxic waste means that my business model is no longer tenable, then that's too bad; I just just find another business model.
The only people using the word "proof" are the ones trying to debunk global warming. "Proof" only exists in mathematics, and the word does not apply to science. The preponderance of the evidence has convinced the scientific community (of climatologists) that global warming is largely anthropocentric. That does not constitute a religion, myth, dogma, creed, or even tenet. It's just the consensus of the scientific community. And are you saying that man has no influence on the environment? That would make man the only living creature whose actions had no effect on its evironment--all life affects its environment, and is capable of rendering its environment unfit for its own continued survival.
The article isn't talking about your money. But even if it was, let's look at that idea. Your money. Do you own an automobile? If so, the exhaust of your vehicle is toxic, and causes pollution that causes thousands of asthma deaths every year, lost workdays due to bronchitis and other respiratory ailments. Exhaust from your vehicle creates pollution that lowers my quality of life, and can even affect property value once a city is known for having bad air. When you start paying the full cost of driving your vehicle, you might get some sympathy. Right now, oil companies and auto companies want you to think that your responsibility ends with driving, but shouldn't you be responsible for the results of your choices? I'm not talking about the spotted owl or some endangered slug--I'm talking about some six-year-old who is having an asthma attack because of air pollution directly resulting from auto exhaust. But let me guess--you aren't responsible, no one who drives is responsible, and dammit we better not raise your taxes to deal with air pollution because that's just crazy environazi fantasy talk. Right.
Sadly, when people like a company's products, they tend to forget that the company isn't innately good (or innately anything) but is ultimately devoted to financial profit. I remember a scene from Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Marlowe is about to go off to Africa, and an old woman at the firm can talk only of bringing the light of religion to the poor benighted savages. Marlowe tries to intimate that the company might be run for profit, but she won't hear anything of it--she prefers the messianic, benevolent illusion over the money-grubbing reality. It's sad how we get emotionally bound up in something as silly as a computer/software company and blind ourselves to what we can plainly see. Apple makes good gear and they don't currently practice human sacrifice, but not much else can definitively be said about them or about any other company.
Um, I think they've had vi running on OSX for some time now. Where have you been?
Not all desktops are Linux-friendly, either. My Sony something-or-other has an Intel soundcard chipset (also commonly used in laptops, sadly) that ALSA seems to dislike intensely. My sound level is about a quarter of what it should be. I've googled the hell out of the problem and there isn't a fix yet, at least that I can find. I've even installed the latest ALSA manually, and no dice. I've tried sound on Ubuntu 6.04, 6.10, Knoppix, DSL, Puppy, DreamLinux, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, and Suse, and the outcome is the same, meaning very, very quiet, so I guess I'll just wait (quietly) for the fix to magically appear, assuming it does. Eventually I'll probably buy a Mac Mini to serve as a media computer. For desktop use, I really love Ubuntu, and if my sound worked properly I'd consider it perfect.
The high executive pay isn't the entire picture. In a culture that pays an exec $400 million in severance pay, there are also expense accounts, fine art in the lobby, jets, and all the other accoutrements of that degree of wealth. And despite your condescension, it is less than obvious that sky-high executive pay has nothing at all to do with the quality of life of the little guy. I don't necessarily think that legislation is the answer--if CEOs and boards of directors want to pay themselves tens of millons of dollars and everyone else minimum wage, that's a character issue, a human decency issue, more than a legal issue. I'm just bothered that we have turned that kind of attitude into a virtue. If the Enron guys had been acquitted, they'd be admired now because getting our own, even at everyone else's expense, is a core value of our culture.
Also, CEO pay has skyrocketed in comparison to worker pay, and no company that pays hundreds of millions of dollars to departing executives can also afford to be loyal and supportive to the workers. In the corporate culture of today, executives are seen as the movers and shakers, the visionaries who create the value, while the workers are seen as expenses.
I guess it is different visiting somewhere than being a native. When I was visiting SE Asia I was very self-conscious about being the only American. But after being around other people I didn't feel so bad. I think the problem is that our own countries reflect on us, and the problems of other countries don't bother us too much. When I was in SE Asia I saw a man slap the hell out of a woman on the street. I found it shocking but I would have been more upset, and in a different way, if he had been an American. Same with our current President. If another head of state displays his, shall we say, intellectual capacity, it's just amusing, but if it's my President then I want to hide under the table. I guess everyone's like that. I wonder if I'll get modded "troll" again for saying that all is not sweetness and light in the USA. What's with people and the troll modding?
Being from the USA, I've always been puzzled that people visit my country. We have Yellowstone National Park (for now, anyway), the Grand Canyon, and some other beautiful scenery, but politics aside, the country is too big. The middle is essentially empty. It's too expensive to get a hotel room, too expensive to travel, and when you add in the political climate, borderline xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, the fact that so many people are armed to the teeth and don't like foreigners, and so on, I can't figure out what makes it so attractive. I understand the point of emigrating from Cuba or Myanmar or even Mexico, but why visit? I'm not saying that the entire country is a disaster, only that I myself, after living outside the country for several years, don't feel safe there anymore, am aghast at the political environment, and am basically embarrassed by much of what goes on there. If I was your guide, I wouldn't know where to take you. But maybe I'm reading too much into it, and everyone feels more or less the same way about their own country. There is probably a lot of chauvanism in my outlook. I cringe around hicks in my own country, but illiterate farmers in, say, Thailand don't bother me in the least. Too much self-consciousness, I guess. I know we don't have a monopoly on jerks or idiots, but sometimes it feels like we have all the Grade-A specimens.
Sadly, not everyone has your aptitude. I certainly don't, which sucks because I am interested in the field. I just don't get it. I lasted a week or two into Calculus I and had to drop it. I was able to memorize a few processes, but I never understood them. At best people like me can use mathematical formulas to find an answer, but that isn't the same as understanding something.
Stories like yours make me glad I wasn't smart enough to hang with CS. I lasted through one week of Calculus I and realized I had to change majors. Math hates me.
Stories like yours are why I decided to not go into the IT field. I like computers, and I like using them as tools, but people are beyond my ken. Are they stupid? No, they aren't--computers are just too complex to understand unless you are interested and want to learn, and even then a willingness to learn won't help you instantaneously fix a problem. And even so, I tell people all the time to backup their files, to be wary of what they download, to run spybot and virus software, but people largely ignore me until their college paper is eaten by MS Word, or their digital pics vanish, and then I can't help them. It's frustrating, because I know what would help them (in the future, not right now), but I'm not going to start yammering about external USB drives and LaTeX and Openoffice and Partimage and Knoppix and all the other seemingly (to me) obvious, easy things they could change to make their lives better computer-wise. Because their coming to me with a problem only means they want the problem fixed, not that they want to learn anything. Took me quite a while to learn that. But in your case they've already enrolled in a class, so maybe (hopefully) your experience is more positive.
This doesn't really translate well to a comparison with the Ipod. To be a valid comparison, Apple would've had to sign contracts with vendors forbidding them from selling any other mp3 players, and that would have to be the reason for their market dominance.
Linux hasn't caught on because 1) it's harder/more complicated, 2) fewer computers (almost none) come with it pre-installed, 3) the shelves and shelves of software in the stores near you contain almost no Linux software, and 4) few companies have a vested interest in pushing Linux. That last one is big. I used to live in Tokyo, and as I walked through Akihabara one evening, I realized that, despite being in the tech capital of the planet, I was seeing no Linux signs at all. There were books, yes, but no 50-ft signs towering over me, no posters lining the stairwells, no bins of Linux CDs, nothing. I couldn't even find it for sale, unless you count the media that came with the books.
But I agree with the other posters that Linux doesn't have to be for everyone. If you take away the command line you've taken away much of what makes Linux powerful, and there wouldn't be much of a point. No pointy-clicky interface will every be as powerful as the command line. I think the fact that over 75% of the world's fastest supercomputers use Linux is more relevant when assessing Linux's value than the consumer market share.
The scientific culture does reward mavericks, and thrives on challenges to the status quo, assuming that the person saying "throw out the old theory" has a better theory. But saying "nuh-uh!!!" doesn't quite measure up to that.
I really, really wish the left-wing hadn't gotten to environmentalism first and staked it out as their issue. I sincerely think that much of the resistance to the idea of global warming is that conservatives just don't want to find themselves in agreement with those irritating, smarmy granolaheads. I can sympathize, more or less. I certainly wouldn't want to find myself in agreement with Ann Coulter, much less David Duke. But the idea that anthropocentric global warming is a "liberal" issue is really hurting us, almost as badly as the idea that civil rights are a "liberal" issue.
The harder they crack down on questionable license situations, the more people get pissed of and move to OSS or other solutions. THere is no way that any commercial entity should have this much power. Ford can't show up and make you prove to their satisfaction that you didn't steal your car. If someone showed up and demanded the receipt for the couch you've had for five years, you'd tell them to piss up a rope, and they'd have no power to do anything. THat's the way it should be with software, too. The burden should really by on the BSA to prove your guilt, not on you to prove your innocence. But the more people they strongarm, the more will choose to move to Linux or some other solution that doesn't expose you to the risk of hellacious audits. I wish more businesses would move to OSS, not so it reaches 100% saturation, but just so OSS isn't seen as odd anymore.