True, but when they helped a guy pick out a going-away-to-college gift for his daughter, what did they choose? A Mac and an iPod, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, well maybe they need a technology expert. His daughter's going to freak when she realizes dad could have gotten her a lot more computer for less money. Score -1 for the gay guys.
It doesn't matter what he said after that. Her face slackened, any interest she might have had was gone. It was such a crushing blow that I went and got myself an Ipod the next day.
You may be projecting your own insecurity a bit. Most likely, this girl was looking to make about 20 seconds of innocent small talk but dropped the subject because she didn't have anything to say about the non-iPod. Hardly a "crushing blow." Same thing could have happened if he'd mentioned he was from Boston, and she'd never been there.
Still, I remember enough of junior high school to know that some of the popular kids really will look down on you if you don't wear the same brands that they do. I guess that's why I'm a geek, though. Fortunately I don't work someplace like Hollywood, where the popular kids from junior high have all the power. If they wanna talk shit to me I can just tell them I've had an mp3 player since about 5 years before they knew what one was (Rio 300, baby! Old school) and I chose my current model because it has a radio and can run on a triple-A battery. And then, they can continue to make fun of me and kick sand in my face. Because just like in junior high, they don't care about same things I care about. They only want to know that their brand is "in," and mine is not. Oh well--such is the life of a geek. But I find the idea of an mp3 player as fashion accessory silly. Who would wear one of these things to a reception, anyway? I would think you'd be there to network and socialize, not tune people out. The idea that anyone would care that you had an iPod is particularly ridiculous at this point, now that 80 percent of NYC can be seen wearing one on the subway. If I wanted to stand out at one of these things, I'd leave the iPod at home and wear, say, an interesting hat. In my experience, women are more attracted to guys who dress and smell nice than to guys with fancy gadgets. Have you ever noticed that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy does not feature a technology expert? Learn from this!
Sounds like the perfect thing for rich dorks who have acquired everything that can be acquired, except for taste.
Unfortunately all these books don't do any good if you don't read them. A prison convict with a 20-year-old paperback edition of Tolstoy has as much a chance at being well read as anyone else. That must be irritating to the millionaire who has exerted so much control over every other aspect of his life.
They just don't get it. The winners are the consumer who gets to pay lower prices for the products and services. The other winners are the stockholders of the corporation who get higher dividends and portfolio value.
Rephrase that. The winners are IBM's top management, who award themselves huge bonuses because of the disproportionate power they hold. The other winners are IBM shareholders. Somewhere down on the list are consumers, who get to pay slightly less for the products and services, after IBM's shareholders and management have taken their cut.
If the livelihoods of those consumers were tied to their jobs in the European tech sector, though, the slightly cheaper products are poor consolation for being unemployed.
Many people think corporations supplying goods (including food) pay tax, but they don't. They pass the tax onto the consumer. Basic economics, since companies view tax as a cost of doing business.
Ask yourself something: If taxes are so easy to pass on to consumers, why do corporations spend so much money lobbying against them?
Why not argue it from the other side? There is no point taxing workers, because they will merely pass the tax on to their employers by demanding higher wages.
Assuming that a product is already priced at a point that maximizes profit, corporations usually aren't able to pass the entire tax on to consumers. So it cuts into their profits.
Most states do not charge sales tax for food or clothing. "Working people," who I assume are the type who have little disposable income, should be spending the lion's share of their income on these necessities.
By "working people" I don't mean poor people. I mean people who have to work for a living rather than live off investments. In other words, most of the middle class.
Defenders of these regressive taxes always point out that their tax is progressive for the poorest of the poor. Maybe 5 percent of the population. They conveniently ignore the middle 80 percent for whom the tax is regressive. People making $40,000 a year pay a larger proportion of their income than people making $1 million. Think that's "Fair"? 'Cause I don't.
Moreover food and clothing are hardly the top expenses for anyone. For most people it's (1) housing (2) transportation (3) insurance with education and retirement savings being somewhere near the top depending on how old one is and whether one has children. A car is hardly a luxury for most people, yet this would presumably be Fair Taxable. And clothing is taxable in my state, at least (California).
If you spend a higher percentage of your income on taxable things--as working people inevitably will--then you'll pay a higher percentage of your income in tax.
The tax system is too complicated... we need the Gullibility Tax. Now, I will cut-and-paste something.
Simply put, the Gullibility Tax is a tax on slack-jawed credulity. If you are enough of a rube to believe that "Fair Tax" is anything but Orwellian doublespeak for a tax system that screws working people to help a small number of idle rich, then send me all your money now.
The best thing about Kozmo--and its greatest weakness, businesswise--was that they sold more than just takeout food. They'd deliver a pint of Ben & Jerry's, a Razor scooter, DVDs. The problem is, they couldn't mark these things up as much as a pizza is marked up. A pizza is made out of $1 worth of ingredients and sold for $15. To make a pint of Ben & Jerry's as profitable, they'd have to charge $20 for it. Who's going to pay that?
SCO and Linuxworld / Maureen O'Gara / Groklaw are his examples? Give me a break. SCO's lawsuits were the last gasps of a company that had been dying for a long, long time. They were dying even during the Internet bubble, for Christ's sake! They aren't dying because the Linux mafia put out a hit; they're dying because no one wants to pay for their OS when their are better, free alternatives.
Magazines come and go all the time too. This bad publicity woudn't have killed Linuxworld if it hadn't already been in trouble.
The power of all the Linux IT staff in the world is a powerful force indeed, but not so much more than that of teachers, bus drivers, factory workers, farmworkers, truckers, cops, or any of the other groups of people who keep civilization going. And as with any other group, management can bring in scabs if the Linux mafia won't do their bidding. You're not indispensable; plenty more where you came from. Any college kid with a (free) copy of Debian and some O'Reilly books is a potential scab worker.
Why should either side care about winning Browser Wars II?
In Browser Wars I, Netscape leveraged its popular browser to gain members for its portal service, which was supposed to be the profit center. It also sold an enhanced version of the browser (or was it actually enhanced, or just licensed for corporate use? I can't remember. I never paid for it.)
Microsoft, similarly, leveraged the popularity of its browser to gain subscribers for MSN portal / ISP.
This doesn't seem to be such an important goal anymore. (Portals are *so* 1995.) So they'd be going to "war" to provide a product that hasn't proved to be particularly profitable. What's the point?
So Darth Vader is evil because he loved his wife too much? That's just absurd. Apply that statement to Hitler or Pol Pot or any other person held up as the archetypical "evil," power-mad dictator type. If anything stands out about them, it's that they are *too* detached from other human beings. They are sociopathic. They lack empathy. They are filled with irrational hatred.
Why does Anakin hate the Jedi? It doesn't make any sense. He was frustrated by his lack of promotion, but is that reason enough to exterminate them, even the children (er, "younglings"?) and his best friend and mentor?
The movie is entertaining enough, but please. If anyone brings up the influence of Shakespeare on Lucas I'm gonna lightsaber 'em. He clearly didn't learn anything about character development from the Bard.
Wow, you're a fucking numbnut. WSJ (The wall street Journal for all of you with uneducated fucktards) has made a killing with online subscriptions.
Not off their editorial page, numbnuts. They give a significant portion of that away at opinionjournal.com. Subscribers pay mostly for the financial reporting, which presumably is easy to monetize given that the WSJ is the newspaper of record for finance.
The WSJ's model is significantly different from the NYT's, you uneducated fucktard.
It's amazing how sleazy that man is, he is just a mouthpiece of Infosys and the Chinese government.
Friedman's Pulitzers have gone to his head to the point where he apparently feels he can do no wrong. His degrees are in, I believe, Middle Eastern studies? Yet he seems to think he's qualified to comment on economics and trade issues. What a colossally arrogant asshat he is.
He used to be better, back in the '80s, when he wrote about Middle East politics, which is an area of which he has some knowledge. But he sucks even at this lately, because he's completely oblivious to how corrupt the Bush administration is. He keeps assuming they mean well, that they'll follow his dream scenario eventually, when everyone who's paying attention knows they aren't going to. What a buffoon!
There is more political commentary on the Web than anyone has time to read. It is the height of arrogance for them to think their editorial page is so important that they can do what no one else can afford to. I read the NYT op-ed every day, but I'm certainly not going to pay for the privilege of reading Thomas L. Friedman phone it in.
Their news reporting is another matter. There aren't many organizations in the world with the resources to rival the NYT's reporting. But this is what they plan to give away! Stupid stupid stupid.
They should do what Salon is doing: Offer a day pass to anyone willing to watch a 30-second ad. Sell an ad-free, year subscription for, I guess, $50. In addition, continue to charge a premium for access to the archives (which Salon doesn't do, but Salon's archives aren't quite as valuable as those of the NY Times...)
But of course they can't go with someone else's proven business model, because they're the NY Times and they're smarter than everybody else! Bunch of wankers. Can't wait to see them crash and burn, then hopefully learn from experience. God knows they've got enough cash sitting around for a failed experiment or two.
They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
It's not a "complete fiction." It's well documented that prisoners are being abused. They made a factual error with regard to one of the specifics.
Meanwhile, 1600 US troops and around 100,000 Iraqis are dead because our government lied about WMDs in Iraq and the press ate it up. Why don't you get upset about that instead?
What's wrong with TigerDirect? I've bought stuff from them before. Cheap prices, good selection, everything shipped on time. No problems. BTW, the banner ad at the top of my screen right now is for TigerDirect.
How were PC-compatibles "reverse engineered"? The components weren't designed by IBM; they were OEM parts available to IBM's competitors. The ROM BIOS was designed by IBM, but IBM published the specs. Building something to specs provided by the original author of the specs isn't reverse engineering in my book, it's "engineering."
Verizon CEO said: "It sounds like a good thing, but the trouble is someone will have to design it, someone will have to upgrade it, someone will have to maintain it and someone will have to run it."
And God knows the city isn't capable of managing anything that complicated. The only comparable thing they do is, oh, I dunno, for example, provide clean water to every address in the city at an affordable price, in a region where fresh water is scarce?
Run a public transportation system that can get you anywhere in the city almost as quickly as a private automobile, for $1.25?
Just minor logistical challenges like that. And other tiny things that work so well no one even knows they're there, until they stop working. The city has certainly never undertaken anything as complicated as--Jeepers!--citywide wifi, which heretofore has been much too daunting for anyone but local cafe owners and college undergraduates to attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but when they helped a guy pick out a going-away-to-college gift for his daughter, what did they choose? A Mac and an iPod, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, well maybe they need a technology expert. His daughter's going to freak when she realizes dad could have gotten her a lot more computer for less money. Score -1 for the gay guys.
TALES OF NEW YORK CITY FOPPERY
Something similar happened to me. I was on the train, ostentatiously reading the New Yorker. A very attractive woman approached me.
"Is that the New York review of books?" she asked.
"No. It's the New Yorker."
"Oh," she said, and all the blood drained from her face.
The next day, I went out and bought a copy of the New York Review of Books to read on the train.
It doesn't matter what he said after that. Her face slackened, any interest she might have had was gone. It was such a crushing blow that I went and got myself an Ipod the next day.
You may be projecting your own insecurity a bit. Most likely, this girl was looking to make about 20 seconds of innocent small talk but dropped the subject because she didn't have anything to say about the non-iPod. Hardly a "crushing blow." Same thing could have happened if he'd mentioned he was from Boston, and she'd never been there.
Still, I remember enough of junior high school to know that some of the popular kids really will look down on you if you don't wear the same brands that they do. I guess that's why I'm a geek, though. Fortunately I don't work someplace like Hollywood, where the popular kids from junior high have all the power. If they wanna talk shit to me I can just tell them I've had an mp3 player since about 5 years before they knew what one was (Rio 300, baby! Old school) and I chose my current model because it has a radio and can run on a triple-A battery. And then, they can continue to make fun of me and kick sand in my face. Because just like in junior high, they don't care about same things I care about. They only want to know that their brand is "in," and mine is not. Oh well--such is the life of a geek. But I find the idea of an mp3 player as fashion accessory silly. Who would wear one of these things to a reception, anyway? I would think you'd be there to network and socialize, not tune people out. The idea that anyone would care that you had an iPod is particularly ridiculous at this point, now that 80 percent of NYC can be seen wearing one on the subway. If I wanted to stand out at one of these things, I'd leave the iPod at home and wear, say, an interesting hat. In my experience, women are more attracted to guys who dress and smell nice than to guys with fancy gadgets. Have you ever noticed that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy does not feature a technology expert? Learn from this!
Sounds like the perfect thing for rich dorks who have acquired everything that can be acquired, except for taste.
Unfortunately all these books don't do any good if you don't read them. A prison convict with a 20-year-old paperback edition of Tolstoy has as much a chance at being well read as anyone else. That must be irritating to the millionaire who has exerted so much control over every other aspect of his life.
They just don't get it. The winners are the consumer who gets to pay lower prices for the products and services. The other winners are the stockholders of the corporation who get higher dividends and portfolio value.
Rephrase that. The winners are IBM's top management, who award themselves huge bonuses because of the disproportionate power they hold. The other winners are IBM shareholders. Somewhere down on the list are consumers, who get to pay slightly less for the products and services, after IBM's shareholders and management have taken their cut.
If the livelihoods of those consumers were tied to their jobs in the European tech sector, though, the slightly cheaper products are poor consolation for being unemployed.
Many people think corporations supplying goods (including food) pay tax, but they don't. They pass the tax onto the consumer. Basic economics, since companies view tax as a cost of doing business.
Ask yourself something: If taxes are so easy to pass on to consumers, why do corporations spend so much money lobbying against them?
Why not argue it from the other side? There is no point taxing workers, because they will merely pass the tax on to their employers by demanding higher wages.
Assuming that a product is already priced at a point that maximizes profit, corporations usually aren't able to pass the entire tax on to consumers. So it cuts into their profits.
Most states do not charge sales tax for food or clothing. "Working people," who I assume are the type who have little disposable income, should be spending the lion's share of their income on these necessities.
By "working people" I don't mean poor people. I mean people who have to work for a living rather than live off investments. In other words, most of the middle class.
Defenders of these regressive taxes always point out that their tax is progressive for the poorest of the poor. Maybe 5 percent of the population. They conveniently ignore the middle 80 percent for whom the tax is regressive. People making $40,000 a year pay a larger proportion of their income than people making $1 million. Think that's "Fair"? 'Cause I don't.
Moreover food and clothing are hardly the top expenses for anyone. For most people it's (1) housing (2) transportation (3) insurance with education and retirement savings being somewhere near the top depending on how old one is and whether one has children. A car is hardly a luxury for most people, yet this would presumably be Fair Taxable. And clothing is taxable in my state, at least (California).
A flat sales tax is neither regressive nor progressive.
You're wrong.
If you spend a higher percentage of your income on taxable things--as working people inevitably will--then you'll pay a higher percentage of your income in tax.
[cue theme from "Deliverance."]
The tax system is too complicated... we need the Gullibility Tax. Now, I will cut-and-paste something.
Simply put, the Gullibility Tax is a tax on slack-jawed credulity. If you are enough of a rube to believe that "Fair Tax" is anything but Orwellian doublespeak for a tax system that screws working people to help a small number of idle rich, then send me all your money now.
The best thing about Kozmo--and its greatest weakness, businesswise--was that they sold more than just takeout food. They'd deliver a pint of Ben & Jerry's, a Razor scooter, DVDs. The problem is, they couldn't mark these things up as much as a pizza is marked up. A pizza is made out of $1 worth of ingredients and sold for $15. To make a pint of Ben & Jerry's as profitable, they'd have to charge $20 for it. Who's going to pay that?
SCO and Linuxworld / Maureen O'Gara / Groklaw are his examples? Give me a break. SCO's lawsuits were the last gasps of a company that had been dying for a long, long time. They were dying even during the Internet bubble, for Christ's sake! They aren't dying because the Linux mafia put out a hit; they're dying because no one wants to pay for their OS when their are better, free alternatives.
Magazines come and go all the time too. This bad publicity woudn't have killed Linuxworld if it hadn't already been in trouble.
The power of all the Linux IT staff in the world is a powerful force indeed, but not so much more than that of teachers, bus drivers, factory workers, farmworkers, truckers, cops, or any of the other groups of people who keep civilization going. And as with any other group, management can bring in scabs if the Linux mafia won't do their bidding. You're not indispensable; plenty more where you came from. Any college kid with a (free) copy of Debian and some O'Reilly books is a potential scab worker.
Why should either side care about winning Browser Wars II?
In Browser Wars I, Netscape leveraged its popular browser to gain members for its portal service, which was supposed to be the profit center. It also sold an enhanced version of the browser (or was it actually enhanced, or just licensed for corporate use? I can't remember. I never paid for it.)
Microsoft, similarly, leveraged the popularity of its browser to gain subscribers for MSN portal / ISP.
This doesn't seem to be such an important goal anymore. (Portals are *so* 1995.) So they'd be going to "war" to provide a product that hasn't proved to be particularly profitable. What's the point?
So Darth Vader is evil because he loved his wife too much? That's just absurd. Apply that statement to Hitler or Pol Pot or any other person held up as the archetypical "evil," power-mad dictator type. If anything stands out about them, it's that they are *too* detached from other human beings. They are sociopathic. They lack empathy. They are filled with irrational hatred.
Why does Anakin hate the Jedi? It doesn't make any sense. He was frustrated by his lack of promotion, but is that reason enough to exterminate them, even the children (er, "younglings"?) and his best friend and mentor?
The movie is entertaining enough, but please. If anyone brings up the influence of Shakespeare on Lucas I'm gonna lightsaber 'em. He clearly didn't learn anything about character development from the Bard.
Wow, you're a fucking numbnut. WSJ (The wall street Journal for all of you with uneducated fucktards) has made a killing with online subscriptions.
Not off their editorial page, numbnuts. They give a significant portion of that away at opinionjournal.com. Subscribers pay mostly for the financial reporting, which presumably is easy to monetize given that the WSJ is the newspaper of record for finance.
The WSJ's model is significantly different from the NYT's, you uneducated fucktard.
PS, why would I pay for NY Times editorials when I can get hilarious reviews of Friedman's latest for free from the NY Press's Matt Taibbi?
Much more insightful and entertaining than any NY Times op-ed, Paul Krugman excepted (Krugman: more insightful, not quite as entertaining)
It's amazing how sleazy that man is, he is just a mouthpiece of Infosys and the Chinese government.
Friedman's Pulitzers have gone to his head to the point where he apparently feels he can do no wrong. His degrees are in, I believe, Middle Eastern studies? Yet he seems to think he's qualified to comment on economics and trade issues. What a colossally arrogant asshat he is.
He used to be better, back in the '80s, when he wrote about Middle East politics, which is an area of which he has some knowledge. But he sucks even at this lately, because he's completely oblivious to how corrupt the Bush administration is. He keeps assuming they mean well, that they'll follow his dream scenario eventually, when everyone who's paying attention knows they aren't going to. What a buffoon!
There is more political commentary on the Web than anyone has time to read. It is the height of arrogance for them to think their editorial page is so important that they can do what no one else can afford to. I read the NYT op-ed every day, but I'm certainly not going to pay for the privilege of reading Thomas L. Friedman phone it in.
Their news reporting is another matter. There aren't many organizations in the world with the resources to rival the NYT's reporting. But this is what they plan to give away! Stupid stupid stupid.
They should do what Salon is doing: Offer a day pass to anyone willing to watch a 30-second ad. Sell an ad-free, year subscription for, I guess, $50. In addition, continue to charge a premium for access to the archives (which Salon doesn't do, but Salon's archives aren't quite as valuable as those of the NY Times...)
But of course they can't go with someone else's proven business model, because they're the NY Times and they're smarter than everybody else! Bunch of wankers. Can't wait to see them crash and burn, then hopefully learn from experience. God knows they've got enough cash sitting around for a failed experiment or two.
They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
It's not a "complete fiction." It's well documented that prisoners are being abused. They made a factual error with regard to one of the specifics.
Meanwhile, 1600 US troops and around 100,000 Iraqis are dead because our government lied about WMDs in Iraq and the press ate it up. Why don't you get upset about that instead?
What's wrong with TigerDirect? I've bought stuff from them before. Cheap prices, good selection, everything shipped on time. No problems. BTW, the banner ad at the top of my screen right now is for TigerDirect.
Teaching children GNU/Linux and other free software exclusively will merely limit their employment opportunities.
I know what you mean. When I was in elementary school, they taught us using Vic 20s and Turtle Graphics. Try putting THAT on a resume.
Tell that to thousands of people who work regular jobs at Microsoft who are not founders.
I was surprised to learn that Microsoft even had a position on legislation that doesn't directly impact the company's bottom line.
How were PC-compatibles "reverse engineered"? The components weren't designed by IBM; they were OEM parts available to IBM's competitors. The ROM BIOS was designed by IBM, but IBM published the specs. Building something to specs provided by the original author of the specs isn't reverse engineering in my book, it's "engineering."
Verizon CEO said:
"It sounds like a good thing, but the trouble is someone will have to design it, someone will have to upgrade it, someone will have to maintain it and someone will have to run it."
And God knows the city isn't capable of managing anything that complicated. The only comparable thing they do is, oh, I dunno, for example, provide clean water to every address in the city at an affordable price, in a region where fresh water is scarce?
Run a public transportation system that can get you anywhere in the city almost as quickly as a private automobile, for $1.25?
Just minor logistical challenges like that. And other tiny things that work so well no one even knows they're there, until they stop working. The city has certainly never undertaken anything as complicated as--Jeepers!--citywide wifi, which heretofore has been much too daunting for anyone but local cafe owners and college undergraduates to attempt.