Macrobrews, maybe. But the USA has an unbelievable variety of extremely high quality microbrews and craft beers. Might be hard to find them abroad, but if you look at beer contest winners the world over, you will see USA brews in the top spots constantly.
I'm self-employed, and the work I do requires that I be online pretty much all the time. I definitely understand what the OP is talking about – the combination of the multitudes of distractions available online and a job that requires you to always be a single click away from those distractions can be tough. I've tried a ton of different strategies, but the ones I found that seem to work the best are:
1. Switch to a standing desk. I find that when I'm standing up, the fact that I will end up physically fatigued by farting around on the Internet tends to keep me focused. Combine this with 2. Workrave. It's a basic timer program (free), designed with ergonomics in mind, that lets you set time limits for work, micro-breaks, and longer rest breaks. What I do is set it up for 10 minutes of work followed by a 1 minute micro-break, and then a 10 minute rest break after 50 minutes of work. I stand up and work for 10 minutes, then the computer tells me to go walk around and stretch out for a minute, and I repeat that until 50 minutes have gone by; then I take my 10 minute rest break, check my email and whatnot, make a cup of coffee, etc. etc. and then get back to work.
If you don't have a lot of natural self-discipline (like me), it's really about consciously establishing a positive routine, rather than trying to punish yourself by locking your computer down or whatever. Worktime needs to be worktime, and Internet time/break time needs to have its own timeslot too. Just my $.02 – good luck! After being self-employed for 6 or 7 years, and struggling to maintain consistent self-discipline during that time, I understand how difficult it can be.
I have this with breakfast now and then. When all is said and done, it's probably a lot healthier for you than most of the commercially-available breakfast options out there.
Just drink some tea or something, for God's sake. Or just have a healthier diet overall, and then you won't need a "kick" in the morning. Sometimes I can't fathom the kind of crap people gleefully dump down their gullets.
I get the feeling that these companies with their DRM are trying to find that sweet spot where they can screw their customers over to the maximum degree while still ensuring profits rise. Graph a negative curve and label it "profits", graph a positive curve and label it "how badly customers are fucked by DRM", and find the point where the two graphs intersect. Then they pull back when there is enough backlash to actually hurt profitability... and then wait a few years and try again.
Steam is basically bullshit too (my brother lent me his copy of Skyrim and I couldn't even install it on my computer) -- but maybe that's because I'm old enough to remember the days (not too long ago) when you bought a game on a physical medium and you actually owned the fucking thing.
In my town, Home Depot moved in and people boycotted the mofo. It's now a massive, empty eyesore of a building (it only lasted 8 months). That's a rarity, though, and the fact that such stores can basically carpet bomb the countryside and just shut down and say "meh" when they encounter such an (extremely rare) instance of community solidarity points to even deeper systemic flaws.
I lived in Japan during the heyday of the MD, and it was a pretty cool set up. I had a stereo that could make copies from CDs at 4x speed, and a playback-only portable player whose battery lasted for ages. As far as I can remember, DRM was not initially a problem. In fact, at all the video/CD rental shops in Japan, they had huge bins of blank MDs which people would buy when they rented CDs – basically they were being encouraged to just take them home and copy them. (Since CDs at that time in Japan cost upwards of US$30, it made a lot more sense to spend $2 to rent the CD and another dollar on the MD.) It was just what you did. It's pretty much unthinkable these days, when you consider the direction Japan has gone in terms of digital rights management and so on, but even just 5 years ago, it was the norm.
I remember the first issue I had with DRM – I had bought Air's "Talkie Walkie" and tried to copy it, and the stereo showed an error. (I then tried to play it back in my computer, and it wouldn't work, which is when I threw the CD in the trash and downloaded a pirated copy.) That said, I actually rarely used my MD system to pirate things – at that point in time, it was the most convenient way to have portable music. And now that I am more conscious of the audio limitations of MP3s, I would actually use that MD set up quite a bit if I still had it.
OK, so let's say it is "just a matter of keeping the schools open later". How much later? Is it going to be a computer lab, or some other part of the school? Who is going to stay and supervise the kids? How much extra is it going to cost to keep everything open and running? Are all the school hours going to be extended, or just a small number of the schools? How are the kids who stay later going to be transported (assuming they ride the bus or something like that)? What about kids who have extracurricular activities? And so on and so forth. The point being is that "just keeping the schools open later" is a lot more of a complicated process that you seem to think. You talk about arrogance, but I've done a lot of work in education – and a lot of work with the logistics thereof – and there's nothing more arrogant than someone making those kind of simplistic suggestions without the slightest consideration as to what is actually involved.
As for the rest of it, you and I seem to live in very different versions of the same country. Where I live, people live out in the countryside because property taxes in the more "urban" areas are cripplingly high, and town meetings/school board meetings tend to be monopolized by the same old yuppie morons who don't have the slightest clue about what it's like to be really, truly poor. But anyway.
That's a pretty simplistic view. We're talking here about the people who are disadvantaged in the 1st place – they tend not to get too much representation in the public sphere as it is. The people who tend to pull water at school board meetings, Townhall meetings, and so on also tend to be the people who have enough money to afford their own private Internet -- not the kind of people the article is talking about. So I guess my question to you is, when you say it's "their choice", who, exactly, are you referring to? The phrase "tyranny of the majority" exists for a reason.
And if you can't see why rural Internet access initiatives are necessary, then I have to wonder if you have ever experienced what it is like to try to get high-speed Internet in rural areas. My mother and stepfather live in a somewhat rural area and are stuck on dial-up because there is one company that offers high-speed Internet and the overhead for the equipment, installation, and so on reaches into the thousands of dollars. I'm not making this up – I was actually planning on buying them high-speed Internet access for a present a couple of years ago, but gave up pretty quickly when I saw how much it would cost. If balking at thousands of dollars makes me cheap, though, I would definitely be curious to see your paycheck.
The petitions are *insidious*. They divert people away from doing what really matters and helps -- writing your elected representatives (and for that matter, staying on top of legislation enough to know what your representatives are getting up to) -- and refocus it onto something that will have no practical policy effect whatsoever. So what if the White House responds -- what do you think "they" are going to say, "oh yeah, you're totally right, Mr. Obama is going to single-handedly kill this new law right now"? It's going to be some cookie-cutter response about how important the voice of the American people is, blah blah blah, and then right back to business as usual. Fuck me, posting a rant on Facebook has more potential to effect political change than those petitions.
The problem is that people either don't care about what our lawmakers are doing in Washington, or they do care but are too busy working two jobs to try to make ends meet, or are too distracted by the infotainment industry telling them about everything *except* what matters. The only time people really mobilize is when something they really, really hold dear is threatened (a la SOPA, when people thought the government was going to take away their Internets) and there is actually enough media coverage that a critical mass of people know about it.
...is that Microsoft has tried to cram two operating systems, which are used for very different applications, into a single OS. If they had just made Windows Metro or something for touchscreen devices and left Windows 7 alone, we would not be having this conversation right now. If Apple has done one thing right, it's that they have for the most part kept iOS and OS X separate.
My wife has a Windows RT tablet made by Asus, and if you stay within the Metro interface, it really is a pleasure to use. As soon as you go to make some changes to settings, or try to use Microsoft Word, you go into the traditional desktop and with a touchscreen that's a nightmare. Likewise if you try to navigate Metro with a pointing device – it just feels weird.
Everybody heralding the death of the desktop and the takeover of tablets has definitely jumped the gun, and Microsoft's attempt to shoehorn us all into their one-size-fits-all view of computing has without a doubt been a failure. They should have made a dedicated touchscreen operating system and forgotten about Surface or at least kept it simple.
Nothing I wrote criticized the concept of the Second Amendment *in the context it was originally written.* The problem is that people are taking it entirely out of context to support their "God given right" to own any number of countless automatic weapons, which falls entirely outside of the spirit of the Second Amendment. Most people these days either ignorantly or willfully misinterpret that spirit.
So you take away the video games from the kids, and what they do? They turn on the TV, where we have a nonstop news cycle of violence, drone strikes, wars all around the world, graphic footage of people blowing their brains out on the news; and when that "news" gets too much, you turn the channel to the movie channel, where you get more films of people blowing each other up in various gruesome ways. Video games may very well be a major problem, but singling out that one tree in a huge forest of a violence-obsessed culture seems a little shortsighted. In the USA, violence is entertainment, and we don't even think twice about it. Then everyone starts wondering why people do shit like this? Give me a break. It's not video games; it's not Marilyn Manson. It's EVERYTHING put together.
And that's before you even consider the other factors here, one of which is – surprise! – the fact that basically anyone can purchase an automatic assault rifle for a few hundred bucks. (My 21-year-old unemployed little brother owns an M-16, for God's sake.) It pisses me off, because all of these people who bang on about the Second Amendment seem to never have read it – the actual words are "a well-regulated militia" or something to that effect, not "every US citizen has the right to be armed to the fucking teeth." Furthermore, the Second Amendment was written when the most dangerous weapon available was a muzzleloading musket; a pretty far cry from an AK-47. I have no problem with somebody owning a small-caliber pistol for their own defense, or a rifle for hunting, but I haven't heard one single compelling reason why your average citizen should be able to own as many assault rifles or other semiautomatic or automatic weapons as he or she wishes. Until somebody really honestly addresses that issue and stops pissing their pants because they're afraid of what the gun lobby is going to do, the rest of the discussion is basically moot.
Yeah, there are definitely cultural influences as well, hence my writing "it's not just as simple as 'nobody can get a gun.'" At the same time there are many societies around the world where assault weapons are not available, and -- surprise! -- massacres perpetrated using assault weapons don't occur.
Generally I think people should be able to own small-caliber firearms for personal defense -- I have been mulling over buying a.22 pistol myself. However there is NO reason, no reason whatsoever, why ordinary citizens should be able to equip themselves with semiautomatic assault rifles. There is no practical reason why such weapons should be allowed to be sold on the open market in any way, shape, or form. I agree with the other responder that guns laws are not black and white, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for the availability of assault rifles or other military-grade weapons.
Japan, where I lived for 10 years, has *nothing* like this. Yes, the occasional crazy has been known to hack and slash up random people with a knife, but a) those incidents are much less frequent than in the US and b) the amount of damage is limited by the relatively indestructive nature of the weapons. And while it's not as simple as "nobody can get a gun", not having access to guns definitely limits the ability of nutters like this guy to wreak havoc on such a massive scale.
I hated a lot of shit about Japan but reading articles like this as my daughter prepares to enter kindergarten really makes me think hard about moving back.
It's not a citation per se, but you can ask anyone who lives or has lived in a country with strict gun laws how many gun massacres they have each year, and the answer is going to be a hell of a lot less than the ridiculous number we have here in the US. Connecticut School? Oregon Mall? Sikh Temple of Wisconsin? Aurora movie theater? Jesus.
My old econ professor said "in the USA, you call it lobbying. In my country and in others, they call it corruption." We have this culture of just accepting it as part of politics when really it should be strictly outlawed, but obviously the only people who will outlaw it are the cunts being paid to keep it legal. Short of a revolution, we are basically fucked. Not in a catastrophic way, but in a "slow, inexorable slide to the bottom" kind of way.
...to everyone ELSE in the office as a way to kill efficiency. Send one person home to sleep it off, or get everyone sick -- are managers really this dumb?
Don't forget that there are other makers of quality Windows RT tablets as well. I demo'd the Surface in Boston, was relatively impressed, and then saw the Asus VivoTab RT -- generally has the same specs, good battery life, and comes with a *free* keyboard dock that not only turns it into a laptop with proper tactile feedback on the keys, but adds another 8 hours to the battery life. All for the price of a Surface sans any accessories. Not a hard choice to make.
Apple's got it nailed because they're not competing with other hardware vendors -- only they can produce the stuff that runs iOS. Microsoft is competing with its own OS customers, though -- naturally there's going to be some cannibalism going on.
I love how the knee-jerk reaction to criticism of Obama is "well, Romney would have sucked too!"
Guess what? They both suck. And the longer we buy into the illusion that there is any real substantial difference between the two, the illusion that democracy is working properly despite there being only two viable candidates who do basically the same fucking thing after being elected, the longer we are going to be stuck with a broken political system.
(As for Obama supporting small businesses -- pfffffffft. It's the same thing as Dubya's energy-efficient house. The little personal actions mean next to nothing in light of the greater policy actions he's helped enable. Do people really not understand this?)
No, Mac is a Volt. Windows 7 is the Prius. Windows 8 is a concept car with two different steering wheels, seven wheels, and two gas tanks -- one for petrol and one for diesel.
I've gotten the Mac equivalent of the BSOD several times -- didn't think such a thing existed until I saw it with my own eyes. Less frequent than XP, more frequent than 7 (so far I haven't had any major freezes on 7).
Slashdot Mirror
Macrobrews, maybe. But the USA has an unbelievable variety of extremely high quality microbrews and craft beers. Might be hard to find them abroad, but if you look at beer contest winners the world over, you will see USA brews in the top spots constantly.
I'm self-employed, and the work I do requires that I be online pretty much all the time. I definitely understand what the OP is talking about – the combination of the multitudes of distractions available online and a job that requires you to always be a single click away from those distractions can be tough. I've tried a ton of different strategies, but the ones I found that seem to work the best are:
1. Switch to a standing desk. I find that when I'm standing up, the fact that I will end up physically fatigued by farting around on the Internet tends to keep me focused. Combine this with
2. Workrave. It's a basic timer program (free), designed with ergonomics in mind, that lets you set time limits for work, micro-breaks, and longer rest breaks. What I do is set it up for 10 minutes of work followed by a 1 minute micro-break, and then a 10 minute rest break after 50 minutes of work. I stand up and work for 10 minutes, then the computer tells me to go walk around and stretch out for a minute, and I repeat that until 50 minutes have gone by; then I take my 10 minute rest break, check my email and whatnot, make a cup of coffee, etc. etc. and then get back to work.
If you don't have a lot of natural self-discipline (like me), it's really about consciously establishing a positive routine, rather than trying to punish yourself by locking your computer down or whatever. Worktime needs to be worktime, and Internet time/break time needs to have its own timeslot too. Just my $.02 – good luck! After being self-employed for 6 or 7 years, and struggling to maintain consistent self-discipline during that time, I understand how difficult it can be.
I have this with breakfast now and then. When all is said and done, it's probably a lot healthier for you than most of the commercially-available breakfast options out there.
Just drink some tea or something, for God's sake. Or just have a healthier diet overall, and then you won't need a "kick" in the morning. Sometimes I can't fathom the kind of crap people gleefully dump down their gullets.
I get the feeling that these companies with their DRM are trying to find that sweet spot where they can screw their customers over to the maximum degree while still ensuring profits rise. Graph a negative curve and label it "profits", graph a positive curve and label it "how badly customers are fucked by DRM", and find the point where the two graphs intersect. Then they pull back when there is enough backlash to actually hurt profitability... and then wait a few years and try again.
Steam is basically bullshit too (my brother lent me his copy of Skyrim and I couldn't even install it on my computer) -- but maybe that's because I'm old enough to remember the days (not too long ago) when you bought a game on a physical medium and you actually owned the fucking thing.
In my town, Home Depot moved in and people boycotted the mofo. It's now a massive, empty eyesore of a building (it only lasted 8 months). That's a rarity, though, and the fact that such stores can basically carpet bomb the countryside and just shut down and say "meh" when they encounter such an (extremely rare) instance of community solidarity points to even deeper systemic flaws.
Our country is theoretically "at war"
theoretically "at war"
theoretically
"at war"
Remind me again when Congress declared war on Al-Qaeda?
I lived in Japan during the heyday of the MD, and it was a pretty cool set up. I had a stereo that could make copies from CDs at 4x speed, and a playback-only portable player whose battery lasted for ages. As far as I can remember, DRM was not initially a problem. In fact, at all the video/CD rental shops in Japan, they had huge bins of blank MDs which people would buy when they rented CDs – basically they were being encouraged to just take them home and copy them. (Since CDs at that time in Japan cost upwards of US$30, it made a lot more sense to spend $2 to rent the CD and another dollar on the MD.) It was just what you did. It's pretty much unthinkable these days, when you consider the direction Japan has gone in terms of digital rights management and so on, but even just 5 years ago, it was the norm.
I remember the first issue I had with DRM – I had bought Air's "Talkie Walkie" and tried to copy it, and the stereo showed an error. (I then tried to play it back in my computer, and it wouldn't work, which is when I threw the CD in the trash and downloaded a pirated copy.) That said, I actually rarely used my MD system to pirate things – at that point in time, it was the most convenient way to have portable music. And now that I am more conscious of the audio limitations of MP3s, I would actually use that MD set up quite a bit if I still had it.
OK, so let's say it is "just a matter of keeping the schools open later". How much later? Is it going to be a computer lab, or some other part of the school? Who is going to stay and supervise the kids? How much extra is it going to cost to keep everything open and running? Are all the school hours going to be extended, or just a small number of the schools? How are the kids who stay later going to be transported (assuming they ride the bus or something like that)? What about kids who have extracurricular activities? And so on and so forth. The point being is that "just keeping the schools open later" is a lot more of a complicated process that you seem to think. You talk about arrogance, but I've done a lot of work in education – and a lot of work with the logistics thereof – and there's nothing more arrogant than someone making those kind of simplistic suggestions without the slightest consideration as to what is actually involved.
As for the rest of it, you and I seem to live in very different versions of the same country. Where I live, people live out in the countryside because property taxes in the more "urban" areas are cripplingly high, and town meetings/school board meetings tend to be monopolized by the same old yuppie morons who don't have the slightest clue about what it's like to be really, truly poor. But anyway.
That's a pretty simplistic view. We're talking here about the people who are disadvantaged in the 1st place – they tend not to get too much representation in the public sphere as it is. The people who tend to pull water at school board meetings, Townhall meetings, and so on also tend to be the people who have enough money to afford their own private Internet -- not the kind of people the article is talking about. So I guess my question to you is, when you say it's "their choice", who, exactly, are you referring to? The phrase "tyranny of the majority" exists for a reason.
And if you can't see why rural Internet access initiatives are necessary, then I have to wonder if you have ever experienced what it is like to try to get high-speed Internet in rural areas. My mother and stepfather live in a somewhat rural area and are stuck on dial-up because there is one company that offers high-speed Internet and the overhead for the equipment, installation, and so on reaches into the thousands of dollars. I'm not making this up – I was actually planning on buying them high-speed Internet access for a present a couple of years ago, but gave up pretty quickly when I saw how much it would cost. If balking at thousands of dollars makes me cheap, though, I would definitely be curious to see your paycheck.
Because that would cost money, and getting people to add costs to a public school budget these days is nigh impossible.
The petitions are *insidious*. They divert people away from doing what really matters and helps -- writing your elected representatives (and for that matter, staying on top of legislation enough to know what your representatives are getting up to) -- and refocus it onto something that will have no practical policy effect whatsoever. So what if the White House responds -- what do you think "they" are going to say, "oh yeah, you're totally right, Mr. Obama is going to single-handedly kill this new law right now"? It's going to be some cookie-cutter response about how important the voice of the American people is, blah blah blah, and then right back to business as usual. Fuck me, posting a rant on Facebook has more potential to effect political change than those petitions.
The problem is that people either don't care about what our lawmakers are doing in Washington, or they do care but are too busy working two jobs to try to make ends meet, or are too distracted by the infotainment industry telling them about everything *except* what matters. The only time people really mobilize is when something they really, really hold dear is threatened (a la SOPA, when people thought the government was going to take away their Internets) and there is actually enough media coverage that a critical mass of people know about it.
...is that Microsoft has tried to cram two operating systems, which are used for very different applications, into a single OS. If they had just made Windows Metro or something for touchscreen devices and left Windows 7 alone, we would not be having this conversation right now. If Apple has done one thing right, it's that they have for the most part kept iOS and OS X separate.
My wife has a Windows RT tablet made by Asus, and if you stay within the Metro interface, it really is a pleasure to use. As soon as you go to make some changes to settings, or try to use Microsoft Word, you go into the traditional desktop and with a touchscreen that's a nightmare. Likewise if you try to navigate Metro with a pointing device – it just feels weird.
Everybody heralding the death of the desktop and the takeover of tablets has definitely jumped the gun, and Microsoft's attempt to shoehorn us all into their one-size-fits-all view of computing has without a doubt been a failure. They should have made a dedicated touchscreen operating system and forgotten about Surface or at least kept it simple.
Nothing I wrote criticized the concept of the Second Amendment *in the context it was originally written.* The problem is that people are taking it entirely out of context to support their "God given right" to own any number of countless automatic weapons, which falls entirely outside of the spirit of the Second Amendment. Most people these days either ignorantly or willfully misinterpret that spirit.
So you take away the video games from the kids, and what they do? They turn on the TV, where we have a nonstop news cycle of violence, drone strikes, wars all around the world, graphic footage of people blowing their brains out on the news; and when that "news" gets too much, you turn the channel to the movie channel, where you get more films of people blowing each other up in various gruesome ways. Video games may very well be a major problem, but singling out that one tree in a huge forest of a violence-obsessed culture seems a little shortsighted. In the USA, violence is entertainment, and we don't even think twice about it. Then everyone starts wondering why people do shit like this? Give me a break. It's not video games; it's not Marilyn Manson. It's EVERYTHING put together.
And that's before you even consider the other factors here, one of which is – surprise! – the fact that basically anyone can purchase an automatic assault rifle for a few hundred bucks. (My 21-year-old unemployed little brother owns an M-16, for God's sake.) It pisses me off, because all of these people who bang on about the Second Amendment seem to never have read it – the actual words are "a well-regulated militia" or something to that effect, not "every US citizen has the right to be armed to the fucking teeth." Furthermore, the Second Amendment was written when the most dangerous weapon available was a muzzleloading musket; a pretty far cry from an AK-47. I have no problem with somebody owning a small-caliber pistol for their own defense, or a rifle for hunting, but I haven't heard one single compelling reason why your average citizen should be able to own as many assault rifles or other semiautomatic or automatic weapons as he or she wishes. Until somebody really honestly addresses that issue and stops pissing their pants because they're afraid of what the gun lobby is going to do, the rest of the discussion is basically moot.
Yeah, there are definitely cultural influences as well, hence my writing "it's not just as simple as 'nobody can get a gun.'" At the same time there are many societies around the world where assault weapons are not available, and -- surprise! -- massacres perpetrated using assault weapons don't occur.
Generally I think people should be able to own small-caliber firearms for personal defense -- I have been mulling over buying a .22 pistol myself. However there is NO reason, no reason whatsoever, why ordinary citizens should be able to equip themselves with semiautomatic assault rifles. There is no practical reason why such weapons should be allowed to be sold on the open market in any way, shape, or form. I agree with the other responder that guns laws are not black and white, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for the availability of assault rifles or other military-grade weapons.
As always, the Onion nails it.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/right-to-own-handheld-device-that-shoots-deadly-me,30742/
Japan, where I lived for 10 years, has *nothing* like this. Yes, the occasional crazy has been known to hack and slash up random people with a knife, but a) those incidents are much less frequent than in the US and b) the amount of damage is limited by the relatively indestructive nature of the weapons. And while it's not as simple as "nobody can get a gun", not having access to guns definitely limits the ability of nutters like this guy to wreak havoc on such a massive scale.
I hated a lot of shit about Japan but reading articles like this as my daughter prepares to enter kindergarten really makes me think hard about moving back.
It's not a citation per se, but you can ask anyone who lives or has lived in a country with strict gun laws how many gun massacres they have each year, and the answer is going to be a hell of a lot less than the ridiculous number we have here in the US. Connecticut School? Oregon Mall? Sikh Temple of Wisconsin? Aurora movie theater? Jesus.
My old econ professor said "in the USA, you call it lobbying. In my country and in others, they call it corruption." We have this culture of just accepting it as part of politics when really it should be strictly outlawed, but obviously the only people who will outlaw it are the cunts being paid to keep it legal. Short of a revolution, we are basically fucked. Not in a catastrophic way, but in a "slow, inexorable slide to the bottom" kind of way.
...to everyone ELSE in the office as a way to kill efficiency. Send one person home to sleep it off, or get everyone sick -- are managers really this dumb?
Don't forget that there are other makers of quality Windows RT tablets as well. I demo'd the Surface in Boston, was relatively impressed, and then saw the Asus VivoTab RT -- generally has the same specs, good battery life, and comes with a *free* keyboard dock that not only turns it into a laptop with proper tactile feedback on the keys, but adds another 8 hours to the battery life. All for the price of a Surface sans any accessories. Not a hard choice to make.
Apple's got it nailed because they're not competing with other hardware vendors -- only they can produce the stuff that runs iOS. Microsoft is competing with its own OS customers, though -- naturally there's going to be some cannibalism going on.
Burned my mod points already, but + effing 1. This post hits the nail directly on the head.
I love how the knee-jerk reaction to criticism of Obama is "well, Romney would have sucked too!"
Guess what? They both suck. And the longer we buy into the illusion that there is any real substantial difference between the two, the illusion that democracy is working properly despite there being only two viable candidates who do basically the same fucking thing after being elected, the longer we are going to be stuck with a broken political system.
(As for Obama supporting small businesses -- pfffffffft. It's the same thing as Dubya's energy-efficient house. The little personal actions mean next to nothing in light of the greater policy actions he's helped enable. Do people really not understand this?)
The fact that Homer looks eerily like Steve Ballmer is the icing on the cake. I tip my hat to you, sir.
No, Mac is a Volt. Windows 7 is the Prius. Windows 8 is a concept car with two different steering wheels, seven wheels, and two gas tanks -- one for petrol and one for diesel.
I've gotten the Mac equivalent of the BSOD several times -- didn't think such a thing existed until I saw it with my own eyes. Less frequent than XP, more frequent than 7 (so far I haven't had any major freezes on 7).