PayPal is a poster case of why governments are needed: freezing, canceling, hijacking accounts with no rhyme, reason, nor customer service. Just imagine if banks where free to keep your cash 'coz they no longer like you.
Actually, I'm afraid you're wrong --- think about it a bit: Firstly, banks, like PayPal, would go out of business quickly if they randomly grabbed money from peoples' accounts (PayPal may 'freeze' accounts and hang on to money for a long time, but it has never just purposely stolen money from its users willy-nilly). So banks have an *incentive* to manage your money well *even* in the absence of government regulation (yeah yeah don't tell me about the credit crunch - that is another story we can dig deeper into). Secondly, the very reason PayPal can act the way it does with relative abandon *is* that it has very little competition, and the very reason it has very little competition is the ridiculous amounts of banking-related regulation in the first place (this India incident, in case you didn't notice, is caused by onerous regulation by a government afraid of capital flight). So too much government regulation has caused this problem of PayPal's behaviour, and you think the answer is 'even more government regulation'. That is the fallacy of regulation --- people think that when it's not working, you need *even more* --- it's an ever downward spiral into massive burueacracies, and why the state is now bigger than it's been in a long time.
I live in a borderline-fascist country where PayPal isn't available, due to onerous government regulation. Do you really believe your life would be better if PayPal didn't exist, and was just another crappy bank? You're welcome to come live where I do, where instead of "suffering" with the likes PayPal, you can have the option of nothing at all, thanks to the government regulation you desire so much. I'll gladly trade places with you, and have PayPal access, that will help my business grow.
I have travelled extensively, so I'm not sure your point there.
The dole? I also would never want to be on the dole, thank you - I think it's immoral to take someone else's money like that - I was raised with values that preclude theft, and I would never be able to live with myself; I'd rather be able to sleep the peaceful sleep of a man who knows he has earned his money.
Actually I don't think it's my job to force others to do jobs that they don't want to do (and certainly not my own children) just to fulfil some arbitrary nonsensical wet dream of equal outcomes. There isn't a problem here; we already, for all intents and purposes, have equal opportunities. The goal has been achieved. Move on to other problems.
So you argue that without socialized healthcare, society would spiral downwards into poverty. Fearmongering. And yet for hundreds of years, in the almost complete absence of socialized healthcare, the opposite happened - the US grew into the most prosperous nation on earth, with one of the lowest poverty rates on earth, and dire poverty virtually non-existent. Now listening to you, it sounds like there is some huge crisis whereby the masses are doomed as civilization is spiralling ever downwards because the US has no socialized healthcare... I guess I must have imagined that whole little history of the US thing.
Without regulations, companies have no reason not to charge you outrageously for everything, since the cost you're willing to pay to live his virtually no limit.
Uh, competition?
How about starting by abolishing regulations such as those that prevent health insurers from selling their services across a state line.
After the Great Battery Scare last year with all those laptops combusting spontaneously their was little choice but to start with at least some regulation regarding the combustable nature of these batteries.
The "Great Battery Scare", in caps!? Lol...oh yes, I remember how everyone I know was so terrified of batteries all last year. Exploding all over the place as they were. I was having so many nightmares about batteries. Communities were crying out all over the country to their leaders, do something, do something about these darn batteries terrifying us all. YMBFJ.
Seriously, this desperate need to paranoidly cry for 'regulation' in the face of just about any completely statistically insignificant 'threat' should be classified as a mental illness and treated as such.
That's what bureaucrats do, it's in effect precisely their task to create unnecessary work for bureaucrats (at taxpayer expense); if they did their jobs efficiently, they'd be out of work, and the more inefficiently they do their jobs, the bigger the budget they get and the more people their department heads get to hire. This is evident in just about every government organisation.
A defect in a product that can kill people? The dealership has nothing to do with this; it's got nothing to do with them, and they have just as little interest in taking action that would harm their own sales. Woz isn't just trying to get a refund or something, he's trying to get Toyota to fix the defect before more people die.
Incompetent? No, I think they know exactly what they're doing: Some bureaucrats smell a cash opportunity, and want to milk it. This is *especially* important during a recession, as they need to also justify their payrolls - now they can look like they're "doing something" while raising the cash to keep paying their salaries, whilst otherwise voters would send them to the streets.
Basically the economic climate naturally increases the pressure for smaller government, while those politicians who know they aren't doing much useful and thus could stand to lose their jobs from 'smaller government' have to try correspondingly harder to come up with some way to justify being paid by taxpayers and generate more tax income. It's like a huge network designed mainly to come up with ways to increase the amount of money flowing into it - basically by definition.
i4i is a patent troll; this isn't a real 'invention', it's little more than an XML editor that allows you to edit data in the styled/transformed view. That isn't a "technology", it's just an obvious extension of how XML-based data editing should work for end-users. i4i are just more sophisticated than the average patent troll, so don't be fooled, but they remain just a patent troll.
Likewise, I also despise Microsoft and their rotten practices stretching back decades, but i4i is a blatent, disgusting patent troll of the worst kind - seriously, it turns my stomach - i4i are the lowest of the lowest bottom-feeding scum of this planet. This is not a real 'invention', it's basically an obvious consequence of XML-based data editing and has doubtless been 're-invented' loads of times... this patent will have a serious chilling effect on the entire XML software world, and will limit the usefulness and adoption of XML, if it isn't already, while the so-called "inventors" rake in truckloads of cash for their bogus patent. I have more respect for a common street thief than a patent troll, because at least the former isn't pretending to be doing something legitimate.
You have an "interesting" view of culpability; by your reasoning, if I pay a hitman to kill someone, I bear no responsibility for the murder that occurs because "the hitman could have said no" and is the one who carried out my request, not me. Does that really make sense to you, or are you just defending MS blindly?
At the very least spend a good deal of time arguing with them, being as difficult and angry a customer as possible, thus driving up their support costs a bit as a kind of aggregate 'penalty' for behavior like this.
What this legislator is really saying is that he doesn't have anything better to do to justify his presence on the payroll. In these tough economic times useless asses like this should be given the boot, so that the money can go to somebody who can do something that is actually productive and useful. (Not just the cost of his salary, imagine the cost of implementation of this thing.)
The thing is that nobody had heard about Bing before MS
Certainly their customers had, and anyone who had ever visited their website or seen their website or heard of them via word of mouth. Are you saying that large companies should be allowed to freely take over trademarks used by very small companies, because, to use your term, "nobody" has heard of the majority of small companies? Fortunately trademark doesn't work the way you think it does; legitimate small companies thankfully also have the same right to trade under a mark without it being taken as large companies do. Provided the companies are legitimate, the only question is not the size of the market, but whether or not the markets are the same or overlapping - trademarks are granted for particular markets. This is something the courts will have to decide, as it's clearly not cut and dry, there is a definite overlap. There is no doubt at all that MS knowingly used someone else's name - what MS's lawyers decided to gamble on is that the courts would decide the markets are different, or that, as is almost certainly the case, they'd be able to settle for a sum of cash that is pocket change to MS but a windfall to the owner of Bing! Information Design. MS obviously did some calculations, and decided that the value of the name "Bing" was worth more to them than a settlement or lawsuit would cost... companies like MS do these things because they can - it certainly isn't going to stop them from using the name Bing.
Men are also more inclined to pretty much give up their personal life to go into higher management, whereas women prefer to forego a career in favour of working part-time.
Because women really deep down just wanna 'make home', while men really deep down just wanna get away from the nagging wife a bit;) (I keed I keed, mods don't kill me)
No one is going to go out of their way to make women feel all warm and cozy.
Noone does it for men either. Men generally treat each other like crap, and all men get ignored, talked over, dismissed etc. until they prove themselves. Women often mistake 'equal treatment' for sexism.
I may be a jerk (like I care if you think I am, ha ha) but I'm definitely not ignorant. My last girlfriend was extremely athletic and she still ate less than half what I eat... we're both slim and very similar in height, weight and build. And yes, your anti-male bias (and anti-facts bias) comes through even again - but you're so deep in it that your own 'benchmark' is off so you possibly (and understandably) don't even realise you're doing it (or you do, because you know it's a manipulation strategy that works to help control people around you - could still be subconscious behaviour though, programmed through reinforcement). So you can either call random guys on the Internet 'ignorant jerks' and ignore their observations if it makes you feel better, or you could tone down that chip on your shoulder and watch your own behaviour for a while and observe that yes you do indeed "play the feminism card" - your call, makes no difference to my life, but could make a difference to yours.
On this point, the facts are fortunately so massively on my side that you're obviously wrong, which should make it easier to see how absurd your arguments are. Fact: Women are on average much smaller and lighter than men. Fact: Women pick up weight more easily than men. Fact: Women are more weight conscious than men. Fact: Women mostly prefer to keep company with men larger than they are (and vice versa). Etc. etc. You can also try argue the sky is purple, it would be about as effective, and about as absurd.
I think 'apartheid' is an Afrikaans word introduced by the Afrikaners, not a Dutch one, though understandably I can understand why there might be some confusion on this point. The word also wasn't introduced to describe general practices of colonialism, it was introduced to describe a political system in South Africa specifically that was not colonialism and post-dates most of the colonial era... so the South Africans probably get the dubious 'credit' for that word.
WTF - the fact that women not only generally eat less but are generally more concerned about their weights, that makes me a woman-hater? Are you for real? I have a question for you, are there really boys who actually put up with your anti-male victimhood BS tactics? Every woman I've ever gone out with in any kind of context at all has not only voluntarily eaten less but been happy to do so.
"No matter how loudly you shout about your rights, they only exist if others recognise and respect them."
Then you've missed the whole point. Those rights exist regardless of whether or not others respect them --- others can either respect them or *infringe on them unethically*, but can never take them away. Your right exists even if it's being infringed. Is that so hard to understand?
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PayPal is a poster case of why governments are needed: freezing, canceling, hijacking accounts with no rhyme, reason, nor customer service. Just imagine if banks where free to keep your cash 'coz they no longer like you.
Actually, I'm afraid you're wrong --- think about it a bit: Firstly, banks, like PayPal, would go out of business quickly if they randomly grabbed money from peoples' accounts (PayPal may 'freeze' accounts and hang on to money for a long time, but it has never just purposely stolen money from its users willy-nilly). So banks have an *incentive* to manage your money well *even* in the absence of government regulation (yeah yeah don't tell me about the credit crunch - that is another story we can dig deeper into). Secondly, the very reason PayPal can act the way it does with relative abandon *is* that it has very little competition, and the very reason it has very little competition is the ridiculous amounts of banking-related regulation in the first place (this India incident, in case you didn't notice, is caused by onerous regulation by a government afraid of capital flight). So too much government regulation has caused this problem of PayPal's behaviour, and you think the answer is 'even more government regulation'. That is the fallacy of regulation --- people think that when it's not working, you need *even more* --- it's an ever downward spiral into massive burueacracies, and why the state is now bigger than it's been in a long time.
I live in a borderline-fascist country where PayPal isn't available, due to onerous government regulation. Do you really believe your life would be better if PayPal didn't exist, and was just another crappy bank? You're welcome to come live where I do, where instead of "suffering" with the likes PayPal, you can have the option of nothing at all, thanks to the government regulation you desire so much. I'll gladly trade places with you, and have PayPal access, that will help my business grow.
I have travelled extensively, so I'm not sure your point there.
The dole? I also would never want to be on the dole, thank you - I think it's immoral to take someone else's money like that - I was raised with values that preclude theft, and I would never be able to live with myself; I'd rather be able to sleep the peaceful sleep of a man who knows he has earned his money.
Actually I don't think it's my job to force others to do jobs that they don't want to do (and certainly not my own children) just to fulfil some arbitrary nonsensical wet dream of equal outcomes. There isn't a problem here; we already, for all intents and purposes, have equal opportunities. The goal has been achieved. Move on to other problems.
So you argue that without socialized healthcare, society would spiral downwards into poverty. Fearmongering. And yet for hundreds of years, in the almost complete absence of socialized healthcare, the opposite happened - the US grew into the most prosperous nation on earth, with one of the lowest poverty rates on earth, and dire poverty virtually non-existent. Now listening to you, it sounds like there is some huge crisis whereby the masses are doomed as civilization is spiralling ever downwards because the US has no socialized healthcare ... I guess I must have imagined that whole little history of the US thing.
Without regulations, companies have no reason not to charge you outrageously for everything, since the cost you're willing to pay to live his virtually no limit.
Uh, competition?
How about starting by abolishing regulations such as those that prevent health insurers from selling their services across a state line.
After the Great Battery Scare last year with all those laptops combusting spontaneously their was little choice but to start with at least some regulation regarding the combustable nature of these batteries.
The "Great Battery Scare", in caps!? Lol ...oh yes, I remember how everyone I know was so terrified of batteries all last year. Exploding all over the place as they were. I was having so many nightmares about batteries. Communities were crying out all over the country to their leaders, do something, do something about these darn batteries terrifying us all. YMBFJ.
Seriously, this desperate need to paranoidly cry for 'regulation' in the face of just about any completely statistically insignificant 'threat' should be classified as a mental illness and treated as such.
That's what bureaucrats do, it's in effect precisely their task to create unnecessary work for bureaucrats (at taxpayer expense); if they did their jobs efficiently, they'd be out of work, and the more inefficiently they do their jobs, the bigger the budget they get and the more people their department heads get to hire. This is evident in just about every government organisation.
A defect in a product that can kill people? The dealership has nothing to do with this; it's got nothing to do with them, and they have just as little interest in taking action that would harm their own sales. Woz isn't just trying to get a refund or something, he's trying to get Toyota to fix the defect before more people die.
Incompetent? No, I think they know exactly what they're doing: Some bureaucrats smell a cash opportunity, and want to milk it. This is *especially* important during a recession, as they need to also justify their payrolls - now they can look like they're "doing something" while raising the cash to keep paying their salaries, whilst otherwise voters would send them to the streets.
Basically the economic climate naturally increases the pressure for smaller government, while those politicians who know they aren't doing much useful and thus could stand to lose their jobs from 'smaller government' have to try correspondingly harder to come up with some way to justify being paid by taxpayers and generate more tax income. It's like a huge network designed mainly to come up with ways to increase the amount of money flowing into it - basically by definition.
i4i is a patent troll; this isn't a real 'invention', it's little more than an XML editor that allows you to edit data in the styled/transformed view. That isn't a "technology", it's just an obvious extension of how XML-based data editing should work for end-users. i4i are just more sophisticated than the average patent troll, so don't be fooled, but they remain just a patent troll.
Likewise, I also despise Microsoft and their rotten practices stretching back decades, but i4i is a blatent, disgusting patent troll of the worst kind - seriously, it turns my stomach - i4i are the lowest of the lowest bottom-feeding scum of this planet. This is not a real 'invention', it's basically an obvious consequence of XML-based data editing and has doubtless been 're-invented' loads of times ... this patent will have a serious chilling effect on the entire XML software world, and will limit the usefulness and adoption of XML, if it isn't already, while the so-called "inventors" rake in truckloads of cash for their bogus patent. I have more respect for a common street thief than a patent troll, because at least the former isn't pretending to be doing something legitimate.
You have an "interesting" view of culpability; by your reasoning, if I pay a hitman to kill someone, I bear no responsibility for the murder that occurs because "the hitman could have said no" and is the one who carried out my request, not me. Does that really make sense to you, or are you just defending MS blindly?
At the very least spend a good deal of time arguing with them, being as difficult and angry a customer as possible, thus driving up their support costs a bit as a kind of aggregate 'penalty' for behavior like this.
That would be "her"self in this case.
What this legislator is really saying is that he doesn't have anything better to do to justify his presence on the payroll. In these tough economic times useless asses like this should be given the boot, so that the money can go to somebody who can do something that is actually productive and useful. (Not just the cost of his salary, imagine the cost of implementation of this thing.)
The thing is that nobody had heard about Bing before MS
Certainly their customers had, and anyone who had ever visited their website or seen their website or heard of them via word of mouth. Are you saying that large companies should be allowed to freely take over trademarks used by very small companies, because, to use your term, "nobody" has heard of the majority of small companies? Fortunately trademark doesn't work the way you think it does; legitimate small companies thankfully also have the same right to trade under a mark without it being taken as large companies do. Provided the companies are legitimate, the only question is not the size of the market, but whether or not the markets are the same or overlapping - trademarks are granted for particular markets. This is something the courts will have to decide, as it's clearly not cut and dry, there is a definite overlap. There is no doubt at all that MS knowingly used someone else's name - what MS's lawyers decided to gamble on is that the courts would decide the markets are different, or that, as is almost certainly the case, they'd be able to settle for a sum of cash that is pocket change to MS but a windfall to the owner of Bing! Information Design. MS obviously did some calculations, and decided that the value of the name "Bing" was worth more to them than a settlement or lawsuit would cost ... companies like MS do these things because they can - it certainly isn't going to stop them from using the name Bing.
Men are also more inclined to pretty much give up their personal life to go into higher management, whereas women prefer to forego a career in favour of working part-time.
Because women really deep down just wanna 'make home', while men really deep down just wanna get away from the nagging wife a bit ;) (I keed I keed, mods don't kill me)
No one is going to go out of their way to make women feel all warm and cozy.
Noone does it for men either. Men generally treat each other like crap, and all men get ignored, talked over, dismissed etc. until they prove themselves. Women often mistake 'equal treatment' for sexism.
What's that big sucking noise?
Let me know if it gets you laid!
I may be a jerk (like I care if you think I am, ha ha) but I'm definitely not ignorant. My last girlfriend was extremely athletic and she still ate less than half what I eat ... we're both slim and very similar in height, weight and build. And yes, your anti-male bias (and anti-facts bias) comes through even again - but you're so deep in it that your own 'benchmark' is off so you possibly (and understandably) don't even realise you're doing it (or you do, because you know it's a manipulation strategy that works to help control people around you - could still be subconscious behaviour though, programmed through reinforcement). So you can either call random guys on the Internet 'ignorant jerks' and ignore their observations if it makes you feel better, or you could tone down that chip on your shoulder and watch your own behaviour for a while and observe that yes you do indeed "play the feminism card" - your call, makes no difference to my life, but could make a difference to yours.
On this point, the facts are fortunately so massively on my side that you're obviously wrong, which should make it easier to see how absurd your arguments are. Fact: Women are on average much smaller and lighter than men. Fact: Women pick up weight more easily than men. Fact: Women are more weight conscious than men. Fact: Women mostly prefer to keep company with men larger than they are (and vice versa). Etc. etc. You can also try argue the sky is purple, it would be about as effective, and about as absurd.
Ummm ... yeah. OK. I think you've been drinking the Chinese KoolAid a bit too long.
I think 'apartheid' is an Afrikaans word introduced by the Afrikaners, not a Dutch one, though understandably I can understand why there might be some confusion on this point. The word also wasn't introduced to describe general practices of colonialism, it was introduced to describe a political system in South Africa specifically that was not colonialism and post-dates most of the colonial era ... so the South Africans probably get the dubious 'credit' for that word.
WTF - the fact that women not only generally eat less but are generally more concerned about their weights, that makes me a woman-hater? Are you for real? I have a question for you, are there really boys who actually put up with your anti-male victimhood BS tactics? Every woman I've ever gone out with in any kind of context at all has not only voluntarily eaten less but been happy to do so.
December 2012 of course.
a slightly foreign concept here, but usually the woman/women get(s) the smaller pieces and everyone's happy. Simple.
"No matter how loudly you shout about your rights, they only exist if others recognise and respect them."
Then you've missed the whole point. Those rights exist regardless of whether or not others respect them --- others can either respect them or *infringe on them unethically*, but can never take them away. Your right exists even if it's being infringed. Is that so hard to understand?