I do not count megabytes, I count the number of components that are GPLd.
While GPL was originally designed for the GNU project, that doesn't mean that every project under the GPL is a GNU project. The popularity of the GPL is a combination of the obnoxious "thou shalt have no license before me" mutual-incompatibility clause of the GPL and Stallman's "only GPL is free" propaganda. But only projects originating from the FSF are GNU projects, by any reasonable definition, regardless of whatever GNU references are made in the names of the projects.
KDE is by no means part of the GNU project, because it wasn't initiated by the FSF (it was, in fact, opposed by the FSF, and a pointless duplication-of-effort/division-of-resources encouraged, due to it being less than pure GNU/free).
The GNU components are not so hard to replace, they were, after all, simply cloned from earlier proprietary versions. The reason they are used is that it doesn't make sense to rewrite them; they work fine and the only reason to do so would be out of spite (or perhaps pure frustration about all this GNU/Linux garbage; while I've heard lots of talk in this direction, it's easier to ignore irritating rantings than to shut them up). If someone wrote a nice public-domain printf formatting function back in 1980, and it got used in Linux, would you think he'd be justified in insisting that Linux be called "printf/Linux" because "you can't run Linux without printf!" ?
The main credit for those cloned Unix tools should go to the original designers, not mere GPL-cloners, and ample tribute is already paid in the choice of name.
All this "GPL/Linux" crap is one more attempt to make out the FSF, and therefore Stallman, to be the root of all software freedom. It's nonsense. Stallman's a bit player with a big mouth and a talent for attracting attention. Free software has been around as long as computers have been made in standard models, previously with the superior freedom of public domain. If the FSF GNU/free thing really was a moral issue, rather than an attempt by Stallman to make himself famous, he wouldn't care about the name (and the FSF webpage wouldn't be full of references to his personal life).
You really should learn some history before you open your mouth. Linux is a kernal not a full OS. Linux is very nice, but would be pretty useless without X, or the GNU tool set which include all the C libraries. Linux without GNU would be unusable.
Of course, XFree86 has nothing to do with GNU.
So maybe we should be calling it GNU/Linux/XFree86? Perhaps LiGNUxX?
For that matter, none of it would be the way it is without the C programming language or the TCP/IP standard (the standards, not the code), and it wouldn't have grown so quickly without the "killer app" Apache service, so maybe we ought to call it C/TCP/IP/GNU/Linux/XFree86/Apache?
Personally, my Linux system wouldn't run the way it does without Perl, Vim, Netscape, and xterm (which together consume more cycles than any GNU code), so I suppose I ought to call what I'm running Perl/Vim/Netscape/xterm/C/TCP/IP/GNU/Linux/XFree86 , right?
Things like short, catchy, popular names aren't important. It's only fair to acknowledge everybody's essential contribution, it's not as if one of these contributors is insisting on the lion's share of the credit when these are all about equally important. Oh, wait...
The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the HURD. Its original name was Alix--named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time.
A heartwarming sentiment, but not all was roses for GNU/Stallman:
It did not stay that way. [... we] redefined Alix to refer to a certain part of the kernel--the part that would
trap system calls [...]
Clearly he was feeling smothered by the relationship, and expressed his discomfort in his code. If he couldn't control his love in real life, he could at least manipulate the code-surrogate he created to show his true feelings.
Ultimately, Alix and I broke up [...] and this made the Alix component disappear from the design.
Torn up by losing the love of his life, GNU/Stallman destroyed 90% of the kernel code in a drunken fit of despair-driven rage. Thereafter he insisted on a complete redesign, being unable to cope with any reminders of this tragic romance.
The fastest way for them to acheive a moderately comfortable lifestyle (by our standards) is for us to take over their lives, but that's basically what we did to (er, ehm, I mean "for", right?) the natives of North America and Australia, and I don't hear them thanking us.
In the long run, they're better off if we just leave them alone. But we won't do that, because if they develop into powerful nations that stand on their own feet, they might offer a military challenge. Manipulators such as the CIA have been knocking the little guys back on their asses for ages.
I think it's possible to build a world with a lower population through the willful participation of its members.
Yes, eliminate disease, lengthen lifespans, ensure that no child starves, let people have as many children as they wish, and population will go down. That makes perfect sense.
We do grow by growing the population, but that wasn't what I was talking about. Growth is moving beyond old boundaries, like Earth's gravity well, facing new challenges, like how to make a portable world of millions of people we can move to another star. Above all, true growth is natural. It arises from natural processes of competition and true challenges, not from a vague belief of penned cattle that something called "growth" is good.
Freedom means giving people room to develop their own culture, full of strange customs and irrational intolerances, not letting them choose between Coke and Pepsi, or Democrat and Republican. Law is culture, bias is culture. Freedom is being able to choose to have 12 children, drown the unfit ones, and beat the disobediant ones, regardless of what the Mer'cans think is the proper way to raise a child.
The resources out there have no purpose but those uses to which we put them. Besides, every expenditure of the resources we now have access to puts more resources within our reach, especially for space travel. If we meet other intelligent life, it might change the situation somewhat, but until then, reaching out for more resources is pure benefit, harming no one.
As for suffering, well, suffering is, was, and ever shall be. One must suffer to grow. Nothing worthwhile comes without pain.
if YOU were starving in Africa, about to die, I think you'd rather have money spent on feeding you than on internet access for some guy who calls himself karzan. Or on his computer, or his car, or any of his luxuries, or for that matter, his necessities.
Do you weigh every spending decision based on how many lives your dollars could save? Remember, you're killing someone every time you buy a snack. You're wiping out a village when you get a new car. So fucking what?
Do you think the poor starving guy in Africa would give a rat's ass about you if the situation was reversed? Sure, he might give lip service to the idea, like you do, but he wouldn't actually weigh your life as meaningful against his comforts or his dreams.
Don't ask what we can do for the starving people. Ask what they can do for us. If we were exploiting them, making profit from their labor, we would have a vested interest in their well-being, and they would have some leverage to make us send them the food they need. Your pity won't save them, but your greed could.
many people also have instincts to kill, maim, and rape--just because they are instincts doesn't mean they are good.
That they are instincts means precisely that they are good, as tested by the evolutionary process.
We have those instincts because we are the descendants of the most brutally successful killers and rapists. In hard times, they are often the difference between the end or continuation of a bloodline.
So I think the idea of an Earth with a constant population of, say, 4 billion, very little disease, very little violence, no pollution, and running on 100% sustainable resources, is very compelling.
The thought disgusts me. No disease, no pollution, I can live with. Those are realistic, and basically inevitable with continual technological development. But driving down the population while dramatically reducing violence could only be achieved by central mind-control, oppression beyond imagining.
You recommend a state of total stagnation, living death. You advocate turning away from growth and freedom in favour of comfort, like a child refusing to leave the nursery. Many would agree with you, and I couldn't be more appalled.
Hacking the cue:cat doesn't harm anyone, and is thus a prime example of situations where the DMCA and like legislation are a bad idea.
Like Hell it doesn't! You take their free product, use it in a way that prevents the profits they were expecting from its use, and claim that it hasn't hurt them? They're minus one barcode scanner with nothing to show for it.
Legal or not, ethical or unethical, you're still screwing them, and discouraging such products from being given away in the future.
I don't think it's a good example of what's wrong with the DMCA at all. It's something you'd never have given you if they'd have known you'd hack it, you didn't pay a fair price for it, and generally wouldn't have bothered buying if they didn't offer it.
I think it's a focus of discussion precisely because it's a marginal case. Cuecat tries to screw the consumer (by not being completely open and honest about why they're giving the things away and what data they're gathering), and the consumers screw Cuecat (by denying them the expected return on investment). Nobody's really holding the moral high ground, so there's plenty of room for argument.
...it is forced on them by circumstances ultimately stemming from customer choice.
tech support person providing polite and effective help for half an hour receives the same wage as a tech support person providing intimidation and ridicule for half an hour
...right up until they are fired for taking an hour and a half with each customer, and having frequent repeat callers, when the jerk next to you is taking 5 minutes and his callers never use tech support twice. You can't take the attitude that the customer is more important than your manager; you get to treat the customer well when the manager tells you to do so.
As a tech writer, what's best for the customer is always best for the company. Those documents only need to be written once, and the better they are, the fewer support calls and returns they will get. You are in a privileged position to be able to follow your natural inclination to be helpful, unless you are hired by a particularly incompetent bastard.
But the pressure to be rude to the customers comes directly from the customers themselves.
The customers select only the cheapest service, this puts pressure on the business to cut costs, which puts pressure on the tech support managers to squeeze more clients for the same tech support dollar, who then start firing tech support guys who take too long to get people off the phone. The jerks succeed, the nice, helpful people get tossed. Some are naturals, while many more are changed by the pressure ("Augh! This idiot is going to cost me my job! I'm under quota! How can I make him go away?").
Of course, the pressure from the customer comes in part from misinformation handed to them in advertising.
I applaud open and honest advertising like this. If more people saw that good tech support is too expensive for cheap products and services, they might start making informed decisions about whether they are willing to pay for it or would be better off learning to handle things for themselves.
Well, they get what you deserve for watching an hour of advertising each day. Of course you're going to make bad decisions based on all that misinformation. I hate paid advertising.
Just as healthy crops grow from rich soil, the surest sign of a superior brain is a full, thick head of hair.
Not the neatest hair, mind you. People with neat, manageable hair have malleable minds. Their opinions can be combed this way and that by anyone with a gob of mental extra-hold gel.
No, the greatest minds have wild, strong, untameable hair, like Einstein.
Employees work for their employers, not for the customers. By making the customers feel stupid, they shift the customers' blame from the company onto themselves.
Companies providing internet access for $20 per month couldn't break even on tech support costs, let alone the cost of providing internet access, if their TS people encouraged customers to call, and actually did their very best to resolve all problems in a polite manner.
Those same customers would never switch to a $50/month company that could profitably supply the tech support they complain they aren't getting.
Smiles and "Have A Nice Day" don't cost much, so they're worthwhile for McDonalds, so you get them. One of the great advantages of presenting a constantly happy, smiling face to the customer is that it makes them seem ridiculous and irrational if they actually complain about the poor quality of the food, or react as if being rushed in and out as quickly as possible is rude (perish the thought!). Imagine how you'd react if a regular restaurant demanded that you order the instant a waiter was available, gave you food that was pre-fabbed weeks ago and heated an hour ago, and rushed you out the door 15 minutes after you came in.
Remember, their "job" as restaurant personnel is to give you a high-quality meal in a relaxing environment. So they're totally incompetent, and rude. Oh, no wait, their job is to make money for their employers, by hook or by crook, just like everyone else's.
Tech support guys don't "mouth off to customers so they'll go away and stop interfering with [their] on-the-job leisure time", they prevent the customer from switching to another service with a minimum outlay of company resources. Sometimes the best tool for this is intimidation or ridicule.
Customers choose to be abused by demanding service at a price that doesn't cover the level of service they need. If customers actually switched to more expensive services when they got brushed off by tech support, they'd get good tech support. You don't always get what you pay for, but you never get more.
Slaves do not overthrow their masters. Occupied countries are never freed by resistance organizations, only by foreign armies or voluntary abandonment.
There is no where left on Earth to run to. The tyrants are subtle in rich countries, and boldly open in poor countries; it's merely a question of whether you're a well-managed resource or a poorly managed one. Even the sea floor has been shared out between the great military powers in treaties, and they have the navies to enforce them.
You can't beat 'em, most can't join 'em, the only option left is to run away, and the only direction left is up.
There is a greater demand than supply. Not everyone who wants one will get one. In these circumstances, as long as there are free traders, the price will rise to a level where demand is reduced to the same level as supply.
Are you seriously saying that you prefer rationing to free market economics? What makes the person willing to place an 8-month preorder more deserving than the person willing to pay 3 times the sticker price?
The only thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that this is way of thinking is so common. Scalpers serve a useful economic function: helping to reduce all prices to purely monetary ones.
Tech: Well, there's your problem. Our service is incompatible with scandisk. Your computer can no longer be used with our system, please get a new one and call back. Goodbye [click]
I deeply resent your implication that Canadians are polite. Some of us can be disturbingly rude at times.
Why, just 2 months ago I saw a man leave a mere 5% tip! It was at a McDonald's, but that's no excuse. If anything, the low price of the food should oblige one to increase the percentage rate of the tip.
Thank you for listening, I hope I have cleared up your misconceptions about Canadians.
A distinction is likely to be made by a civil court in asessing damages though.
Indeed - the distinction that a best selling novel is offered for sale and thus has commercial value, so damages could be awarded, whereas the private documents have no commercial value, and therefor this would be frivolous litigation and the plaintiff would get his head handed to him by the judge. Assuming that it was indeed considered to be a copyrighted work rather than "speech" which just happened to be fixed on paper.
Publishing the entire document is defacto fair use in this case; any way you look at it, copyright law does not apply in a significant manner.
That would be like your mechanic laughing at you because you didn't understand the [insert rambling, incomprehensible car problem here] and then getting hostile toward you because you didn't know how to fix it yourself. After all, all you'd need is a brain and a [insert name of obscure, baffling automotive tool], right?
Actually, it's more like your mechanic mocking you because you put brake fluid where the oil should go. If I did that, I wouldn't like it, but I would sure deserve it. (and, incidentally, the reason I don't fix my own car is because it's cheaper to take the car to a mechanic once or twice a year than to buy the $100,000 or so worth of obscure, baffling automotive tools I'd need to service a modern automobile)
People learn a lot about their cars. They spend a year (or at least several months) of carefully supervised driving. Aside from the complexities of driving the thing, they're expected to know enough about the mechanics to recognize a problem before the car stops working, and to do things like change tires.
Using a computer to access the internet is at least as complicated as driving. Yet, somehow people expect to just sit down and have it all work perfectly, without any study, without a teacher sitting by them for months, without paying a skilled technician a fair fee for keeping it working.
Sure, it's sold to them without mention of how much learning is necessary if you haven't used one before, but so is a car. Nobody writes car ads like "You'll enjoy the smooth handling of the new Mercury Mystake (assuming you're already a competent automobile operator; service contract doesn't include training)."
Tech support providers make ignorant people feel stupid for a reason: to discourage them from calling again, so they go get real training from their "friend who knows all about computers". There isn't enough money in internet connection fees to actually teach every user how to use the computer.
The "boxen" inside joke was funny, the first time I heard it, when I thought it was a one-shot joke. Using it consistently is just plain stupid, but anyone who takes the initiative to stretch the bad joke into other uses is a major-league asshole.
English is screwed up enough as it is, and it's the language the world is being forced to learn. This kind of shit is confusing to students of English, and offensive to native speakers.
1) popsicles
2) MRI scan models (presumably colored with different flavors of popsicle base)
The result? Finally, an anatomically correct model of a diseased bowel that you can eat!
I suspect physicians would abuse their scanner privileges if they got to eat it themselves, so the hospitals will have to feed it to someone else. So that's one more category of surgical waste to add to cafeteria menus.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not count megabytes, I count the number of components that are GPLd.
While GPL was originally designed for the GNU project, that doesn't mean that every project under the GPL is a GNU project. The popularity of the GPL is a combination of the obnoxious "thou shalt have no license before me" mutual-incompatibility clause of the GPL and Stallman's "only GPL is free" propaganda. But only projects originating from the FSF are GNU projects, by any reasonable definition, regardless of whatever GNU references are made in the names of the projects.
KDE is by no means part of the GNU project, because it wasn't initiated by the FSF (it was, in fact, opposed by the FSF, and a pointless duplication-of-effort/division-of-resources encouraged, due to it being less than pure GNU/free).
The GNU components are not so hard to replace, they were, after all, simply cloned from earlier proprietary versions. The reason they are used is that it doesn't make sense to rewrite them; they work fine and the only reason to do so would be out of spite (or perhaps pure frustration about all this GNU/Linux garbage; while I've heard lots of talk in this direction, it's easier to ignore irritating rantings than to shut them up). If someone wrote a nice public-domain printf formatting function back in 1980, and it got used in Linux, would you think he'd be justified in insisting that Linux be called "printf/Linux" because "you can't run Linux without printf!" ?
The main credit for those cloned Unix tools should go to the original designers, not mere GPL-cloners, and ample tribute is already paid in the choice of name.
All this "GPL/Linux" crap is one more attempt to make out the FSF, and therefore Stallman, to be the root of all software freedom. It's nonsense. Stallman's a bit player with a big mouth and a talent for attracting attention. Free software has been around as long as computers have been made in standard models, previously with the superior freedom of public domain. If the FSF GNU/free thing really was a moral issue, rather than an attempt by Stallman to make himself famous, he wouldn't care about the name (and the FSF webpage wouldn't be full of references to his personal life).
--------
You really should learn some history before you open your mouth. Linux is a kernal not a full OS. Linux is very nice, but would be pretty useless without X, or the GNU tool set which include all the C libraries. Linux without GNU would be unusable.
6 , right?
Of course, XFree86 has nothing to do with GNU.
So maybe we should be calling it GNU/Linux/XFree86? Perhaps LiGNUxX?
For that matter, none of it would be the way it is without the C programming language or the TCP/IP standard (the standards, not the code), and it wouldn't have grown so quickly without the "killer app" Apache service, so maybe we ought to call it C/TCP/IP/GNU/Linux/XFree86/Apache?
Personally, my Linux system wouldn't run the way it does without Perl, Vim, Netscape, and xterm (which together consume more cycles than any GNU code), so I suppose I ought to call what I'm running Perl/Vim/Netscape/xterm/C/TCP/IP/GNU/Linux/XFree8
Things like short, catchy, popular names aren't important. It's only fair to acknowledge everybody's essential contribution, it's not as if one of these contributors is insisting on the lion's share of the credit when these are all about equally important. Oh, wait...
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A heartwarming sentiment, but not all was roses for GNU/Stallman:
Clearly he was feeling smothered by the relationship, and expressed his discomfort in his code. If he couldn't control his love in real life, he could at least manipulate the code-surrogate he created to show his true feelings.
Torn up by losing the love of his life, GNU/Stallman destroyed 90% of the kernel code in a drunken fit of despair-driven rage. Thereafter he insisted on a complete redesign, being unable to cope with any reminders of this tragic romance.
And that's why we run Linux.
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The fastest way for them to acheive a moderately comfortable lifestyle (by our standards) is for us to take over their lives, but that's basically what we did to (er, ehm, I mean "for", right?) the natives of North America and Australia, and I don't hear them thanking us.
In the long run, they're better off if we just leave them alone. But we won't do that, because if they develop into powerful nations that stand on their own feet, they might offer a military challenge. Manipulators such as the CIA have been knocking the little guys back on their asses for ages.
--------
I think it's possible to build a world with a lower population through the willful participation of its members.
Yes, eliminate disease, lengthen lifespans, ensure that no child starves, let people have as many children as they wish, and population will go down. That makes perfect sense.
We do grow by growing the population, but that wasn't what I was talking about. Growth is moving beyond old boundaries, like Earth's gravity well, facing new challenges, like how to make a portable world of millions of people we can move to another star. Above all, true growth is natural. It arises from natural processes of competition and true challenges, not from a vague belief of penned cattle that something called "growth" is good.
Freedom means giving people room to develop their own culture, full of strange customs and irrational intolerances, not letting them choose between Coke and Pepsi, or Democrat and Republican. Law is culture, bias is culture. Freedom is being able to choose to have 12 children, drown the unfit ones, and beat the disobediant ones, regardless of what the Mer'cans think is the proper way to raise a child.
The resources out there have no purpose but those uses to which we put them. Besides, every expenditure of the resources we now have access to puts more resources within our reach, especially for space travel. If we meet other intelligent life, it might change the situation somewhat, but until then, reaching out for more resources is pure benefit, harming no one.
As for suffering, well, suffering is, was, and ever shall be. One must suffer to grow. Nothing worthwhile comes without pain.
--------
I think you are being optimistic to think you will live that long.
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if YOU were starving in Africa, about to die, I think you'd rather have money spent on feeding you than on internet access for some guy who calls himself karzan. Or on his computer, or his car, or any of his luxuries, or for that matter, his necessities.
Do you weigh every spending decision based on how many lives your dollars could save? Remember, you're killing someone every time you buy a snack. You're wiping out a village when you get a new car. So fucking what?
Do you think the poor starving guy in Africa would give a rat's ass about you if the situation was reversed? Sure, he might give lip service to the idea, like you do, but he wouldn't actually weigh your life as meaningful against his comforts or his dreams.
Don't ask what we can do for the starving people. Ask what they can do for us. If we were exploiting them, making profit from their labor, we would have a vested interest in their well-being, and they would have some leverage to make us send them the food they need. Your pity won't save them, but your greed could.
--------
many people also have instincts to kill, maim, and rape--just because they are instincts doesn't mean they are good.
That they are instincts means precisely that they are good, as tested by the evolutionary process.
We have those instincts because we are the descendants of the most brutally successful killers and rapists. In hard times, they are often the difference between the end or continuation of a bloodline.
So I think the idea of an Earth with a constant population of, say, 4 billion, very little disease, very little violence, no pollution, and running on 100% sustainable resources, is very compelling.
The thought disgusts me. No disease, no pollution, I can live with. Those are realistic, and basically inevitable with continual technological development. But driving down the population while dramatically reducing violence could only be achieved by central mind-control, oppression beyond imagining.
You recommend a state of total stagnation, living death. You advocate turning away from growth and freedom in favour of comfort, like a child refusing to leave the nursery. Many would agree with you, and I couldn't be more appalled.
--------
Hacking the cue:cat doesn't harm anyone, and is thus a prime example of situations where the DMCA and like legislation are a bad idea.
Like Hell it doesn't! You take their free product, use it in a way that prevents the profits they were expecting from its use, and claim that it hasn't hurt them? They're minus one barcode scanner with nothing to show for it.
Legal or not, ethical or unethical, you're still screwing them, and discouraging such products from being given away in the future.
I don't think it's a good example of what's wrong with the DMCA at all. It's something you'd never have given you if they'd have known you'd hack it, you didn't pay a fair price for it, and generally wouldn't have bothered buying if they didn't offer it.
I think it's a focus of discussion precisely because it's a marginal case. Cuecat tries to screw the consumer (by not being completely open and honest about why they're giving the things away and what data they're gathering), and the consumers screw Cuecat (by denying them the expected return on investment). Nobody's really holding the moral high ground, so there's plenty of room for argument.
--------
...it is forced on them by circumstances ultimately stemming from customer choice.
tech support person providing polite and effective help for half an hour receives the same wage as a tech support person providing intimidation and ridicule for half an hour
...right up until they are fired for taking an hour and a half with each customer, and having frequent repeat callers, when the jerk next to you is taking 5 minutes and his callers never use tech support twice. You can't take the attitude that the customer is more important than your manager; you get to treat the customer well when the manager tells you to do so.
As a tech writer, what's best for the customer is always best for the company. Those documents only need to be written once, and the better they are, the fewer support calls and returns they will get. You are in a privileged position to be able to follow your natural inclination to be helpful, unless you are hired by a particularly incompetent bastard.
But the pressure to be rude to the customers comes directly from the customers themselves.
The customers select only the cheapest service, this puts pressure on the business to cut costs, which puts pressure on the tech support managers to squeeze more clients for the same tech support dollar, who then start firing tech support guys who take too long to get people off the phone. The jerks succeed, the nice, helpful people get tossed. Some are naturals, while many more are changed by the pressure ("Augh! This idiot is going to cost me my job! I'm under quota! How can I make him go away?").
Of course, the pressure from the customer comes in part from misinformation handed to them in advertising.
I applaud open and honest advertising like this. If more people saw that good tech support is too expensive for cheap products and services, they might start making informed decisions about whether they are willing to pay for it or would be better off learning to handle things for themselves.
Well, they get what you deserve for watching an hour of advertising each day. Of course you're going to make bad decisions based on all that misinformation. I hate paid advertising.
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I always vote for the one with the best hair.
Just as healthy crops grow from rich soil, the surest sign of a superior brain is a full, thick head of hair.
Not the neatest hair, mind you. People with neat, manageable hair have malleable minds. Their opinions can be combed this way and that by anyone with a gob of mental extra-hold gel.
No, the greatest minds have wild, strong, untameable hair, like Einstein.
--------
Employees work for their employers, not for the customers. By making the customers feel stupid, they shift the customers' blame from the company onto themselves.
Companies providing internet access for $20 per month couldn't break even on tech support costs, let alone the cost of providing internet access, if their TS people encouraged customers to call, and actually did their very best to resolve all problems in a polite manner.
Those same customers would never switch to a $50/month company that could profitably supply the tech support they complain they aren't getting.
Smiles and "Have A Nice Day" don't cost much, so they're worthwhile for McDonalds, so you get them. One of the great advantages of presenting a constantly happy, smiling face to the customer is that it makes them seem ridiculous and irrational if they actually complain about the poor quality of the food, or react as if being rushed in and out as quickly as possible is rude (perish the thought!). Imagine how you'd react if a regular restaurant demanded that you order the instant a waiter was available, gave you food that was pre-fabbed weeks ago and heated an hour ago, and rushed you out the door 15 minutes after you came in.
Remember, their "job" as restaurant personnel is to give you a high-quality meal in a relaxing environment. So they're totally incompetent, and rude. Oh, no wait, their job is to make money for their employers, by hook or by crook, just like everyone else's.
Tech support guys don't "mouth off to customers so they'll go away and stop interfering with [their] on-the-job leisure time", they prevent the customer from switching to another service with a minimum outlay of company resources. Sometimes the best tool for this is intimidation or ridicule.
Customers choose to be abused by demanding service at a price that doesn't cover the level of service they need. If customers actually switched to more expensive services when they got brushed off by tech support, they'd get good tech support. You don't always get what you pay for, but you never get more.
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$150 for "cheap" video cards...
I can hear the console gamers laughing.
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Somewhere, possibly in Russia, some poor, misled hacker now has to read MS source code.
Poor bastard.
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Slaves do not overthrow their masters. Occupied countries are never freed by resistance organizations, only by foreign armies or voluntary abandonment.
There is no where left on Earth to run to. The tyrants are subtle in rich countries, and boldly open in poor countries; it's merely a question of whether you're a well-managed resource or a poorly managed one. Even the sea floor has been shared out between the great military powers in treaties, and they have the navies to enforce them.
You can't beat 'em, most can't join 'em, the only option left is to run away, and the only direction left is up.
--------
There is a greater demand than supply. Not everyone who wants one will get one. In these circumstances, as long as there are free traders, the price will rise to a level where demand is reduced to the same level as supply.
Are you seriously saying that you prefer rationing to free market economics? What makes the person willing to place an 8-month preorder more deserving than the person willing to pay 3 times the sticker price?
The only thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that this is way of thinking is so common. Scalpers serve a useful economic function: helping to reduce all prices to purely monetary ones.
--------
Tech: Well, there's your problem. Our service is incompatible with scandisk. Your computer can no longer be used with our system, please get a new one and call back. Goodbye [click]
--------
Dear sir,
I deeply resent your implication that Canadians are polite. Some of us can be disturbingly rude at times.
Why, just 2 months ago I saw a man leave a mere 5% tip! It was at a McDonald's, but that's no excuse. If anything, the low price of the food should oblige one to increase the percentage rate of the tip.
Thank you for listening, I hope I have cleared up your misconceptions about Canadians.
Regards,
A. Canuck
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C is for Cookie,
That's good enough for me.
Wasn't the DMCA about the right of giant evil corporations to own cookies on your hard drive so that it's an illegal act of vandalism to delete them?
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"It sometimes amazes me how the average IQ of Slashdot readers has dropped in the past 12 months."
-Sanity
Looks like a good sig to me.
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A distinction is likely to be made by a civil court in asessing damages though.
Indeed - the distinction that a best selling novel is offered for sale and thus has commercial value, so damages could be awarded, whereas the private documents have no commercial value, and therefor this would be frivolous litigation and the plaintiff would get his head handed to him by the judge. Assuming that it was indeed considered to be a copyrighted work rather than "speech" which just happened to be fixed on paper.
Publishing the entire document is defacto fair use in this case; any way you look at it, copyright law does not apply in a significant manner.
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That would be like your mechanic laughing at you because you didn't understand the [insert rambling, incomprehensible car problem here] and then getting hostile toward you because you didn't know how to fix it yourself. After all, all you'd need is a brain and a [insert name of obscure, baffling automotive tool], right?
Actually, it's more like your mechanic mocking you because you put brake fluid where the oil should go. If I did that, I wouldn't like it, but I would sure deserve it. (and, incidentally, the reason I don't fix my own car is because it's cheaper to take the car to a mechanic once or twice a year than to buy the $100,000 or so worth of obscure, baffling automotive tools I'd need to service a modern automobile)
People learn a lot about their cars. They spend a year (or at least several months) of carefully supervised driving. Aside from the complexities of driving the thing, they're expected to know enough about the mechanics to recognize a problem before the car stops working, and to do things like change tires.
Using a computer to access the internet is at least as complicated as driving. Yet, somehow people expect to just sit down and have it all work perfectly, without any study, without a teacher sitting by them for months, without paying a skilled technician a fair fee for keeping it working.
Sure, it's sold to them without mention of how much learning is necessary if you haven't used one before, but so is a car. Nobody writes car ads like "You'll enjoy the smooth handling of the new Mercury Mystake (assuming you're already a competent automobile operator; service contract doesn't include training)."
Tech support providers make ignorant people feel stupid for a reason: to discourage them from calling again, so they go get real training from their "friend who knows all about computers". There isn't enough money in internet connection fees to actually teach every user how to use the computer.
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The "boxen" inside joke was funny, the first time I heard it, when I thought it was a one-shot joke. Using it consistently is just plain stupid, but anyone who takes the initiative to stretch the bad joke into other uses is a major-league asshole.
English is screwed up enough as it is, and it's the language the world is being forced to learn. This kind of shit is confusing to students of English, and offensive to native speakers.
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now expensive restaurants can make ice cubes in the shape of their restaraunt logo
You know, they could do that pretty easily right now. It's called a "mold".
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1) popsicles
2) MRI scan models (presumably colored with different flavors of popsicle base)
The result? Finally, an anatomically correct model of a diseased bowel that you can eat!
I suspect physicians would abuse their scanner privileges if they got to eat it themselves, so the hospitals will have to feed it to someone else. So that's one more category of surgical waste to add to cafeteria menus.
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