Yes, there were partisan politics. Partisan politics are not mutually exclusive to caring about one's country. However, the current crop of politicians seem to have forgotten the basics of taking care of one's country, and are actively neglecting to do so in favor of, well, handing out favors and helping themselves.
The "2008 models" was an analogy to OS X only running on Macs, despite no legitimate reason why it shouldn't be possible. IE, you've got to buy a Ford to get the fancy multimedia package, and we're charging a premium on Ford vehicles today.
Counter-examples: swatches, gaudy plastic beads, Converse sneakers, small fuel-efficient cars and mopeds, and so on and so forth...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but desktop/laptop computers have yet to reach "commodity" status. That is what you are describing, for the most part. Computers are close, but not there yet: there's too much functional variety.
A commodity item is not going to have any sort of exclusive nature except in how it's sold and at what price. Short of having an identical brand on it, there's nothing to stop a company to produce something which is both functionally identical and nearly identical in appearance. THAT is commodity goods.
Cell phones are (or were, until the iPhone came to the market) commodity goods. Toasters are commodity. Furniture is commodity. Anything which has its value based on the value of the market as a whole is a commodity
If it were otherwise, your analogy would be valid. But since it isn't, it's not. See how that works?
A better analogy would be tools, such as the type one keeps in his garage.
You also realize that, back then, the hardware actually cost those premiums, right?
Things were different in the 1980s, too. Back in the 1980s, people bought hardware and put software on. Today, people buy software to put on their hardware. There is a big difference between those, even though it may seem subtle.
People don't care if they've got a P4, an Athlon, Hyperthreading, dual core, or any of that stuff. What they care about is their preferred software running quickly and stable.
What would happen to, say, Ford, if they started selling packaged "automotive entertainment systems", but required that they only be installed in a Ford? And, in doing so, they put a proprietary coupler/circuitry/whatever in all Fords so that it would work with a Ford.
And then they didn't advertise the fact of this coupler, but instead advertised "Works with 2008 models!" - like what Apple has been doing with Intel (as people associate "Intel" with "Wintel" - and all the respective vendors).
And even that's not a terribly good analogy, as Apple's hardware tends to be the exact same thing (or close enough to not make much of a difference) as their competition.
So a 4-star general should just drop his role as a top advisor to the President of the United States because he disagrees with the course of action?
Again, a 4-star general?
And being there to try and fix things was a better option, anyway. What would you have preferred: for him to throw in the towel in a huff for personal political gain?
That's not the kind of person I want anywhere the seat of power. Powell did the Right Thing.
I don't recall who said it, but a quote similar to this, by one of our founding fathers, is appropriate:
The republic will last as long as the people refuse to vote themselves the treasury.
(I believe that was Ben Franklin.)
It was well understood by the founding fathers that this country would not survive as a republican democracy, with a limited federal government, without a well-educated, well-informed populace who were willing to vote for the greater good (as seen through the lens of self-reliance and self-determination).
The Great Depression broke that spine - not only the economic depression itself, but the asinine and abusive policies Roosevelt put in place to ensure "employment" - while at the same time squashing free will and the ability to innovate. He kept the depression running at least 5 years longer than it would have otherwise (in fact, the economy was already recovering by the time his policies started affecting things - resulting in another downturn).
Now, we're in a situation where both parties play politics in the purest sense, and whichever one promises the best "deal" to the most people, wins - neither party gives a damn about principle and ensuring peoples' liberties to do as they please, and our taxes are many times higher now than they were when the tea went into Boston Harbor.
A smart or educated person can leave the country once they've fucked it up to no or relative loss. A property owner is, essentially, fucked if the country goes to shit. A property owner has to live with his decisions and take the losses.
A PhD living, say, in a rental, has no such responsibility to vote in a conscionable manner to ensure the property of his compatriots remains safe. "Who cares if property taxes go up? I'm goddamn renting and it's for the public good!"
And what is it that non-property owners bring to the table, in terms of capital to drive the nation? More importantly, what have they to lose - not land or property, just themselves. A person, unlike property, can withstand the throes of economic hardship or war simply by leaving.
If they're not helping row the boat, why should they get a say in which direction it goes?
It's like the children getting to decide on which side of the road to drive while on the way to vacation. "Let's go this way!" "No, let's go this way now!" End result: you never make any progress and the people who actually have to do the work get very, very mad. Ergo, totalitarianism, ie "Goddamn kids, shut up and let me drive!"
Undersigned, Caimlas, the non-property or asset owner who realizes that most people in his condition are even less fit than he is to decide on the fate of others, as they're unable to make even their own lives functional.
What, exactly, do you think the role of a politician is? In this republic - the United States of America - it is intended to be that of a civil servant. That may not be the case in practice, but it is the philosophy to which we should strive.
And no, this does not mean I think Powell would make a good VP, for either party. Though he'd make a better one for Obama than for McCain.
It used to be that the VP would be the loser from the actual Presidential race, not the party primary. But that was before partisan politics ran the country, and the politicians actually - at least - pretended to care about the fate of America. You know, back when there was at least some rough idea that both sides would put aside their petty differences and try to work together for the betterment of the country.
A younger President who fucks over the country won't have to go down with the country. He'll just go chum overseas with some bureaucrat or royal heir after cashing out his/her billions into a foreign currency. It happens in other countries, and it will happen here, too: the rich, famous, powerful and influential people in this world are never held accountable for their actions.
Cases in point: Michael Jackson or Nelson Mandela. Or for that matter, GWB.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this "white America is overtly racist".
I am a white man. At least, that's what I have to check when filling out those goddamn affirmative action questionnaires on employment applications. But I, nor any white man I know, is racist. The only racists I have ever met have been black, Mexican (ie, 1st or 2nd generation American inhabitants), and Asian (Chinese and Japanese). I once heard of a crazy motherfucker named Dewey, who was always talking about killing niggers, but he's the exception to the rule, and was chastised and shunned as a result.
I see a lot of hatred for the so-called "black culture" which is manifest in rap music. But no self-respecting black man (or man of any color) would call the things talked about in that music "his". It's more likely, in my experience, for only the criminally minded types (many of which are white) to adhere to things like that.
White Americans are, by and large, afraid of even being thought of as racist. Many are so incredible fearful of such a labeling - because it is quite often a label which will result in job termination, social chastisement, lawsuit, and any number of other things - that they'll go out of their way to side with the race card holders and claim themselves that whites are racist. The only claim I can imagine them having is against the institutional nature of racism, and even that can be easily dismissed by things like affirmative action, various social programs and, well, the fact that there's a black presidential candidate.
If whites are so overtly racist, then why are groups like the KKK almost universally reviled amongst whites (yes, even out in the sticks), but groups run by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan are praised and heralded by the media while they preach that all of society's ills are the whitey's fault? That doesn't sound like racism against blacks to me.
Yes, there are fringe groups. There are always fringe groups - in every culture, hating every other culture. But let's have some fucking intellectual integrity, people: any racism against blacks, above that of any other cultural group, is manifest almost exclusively by the media.
If Obama doesn't "survive to inauguration" as you suggest, it isn't because whitey hates blacks - though that'll surely be the accusation across the country. If it happens (and I highly doubt it will), it would most likely be for some other policy or holds, or simply to leverage his death has a martyrdom by the establishment to enforce more totalitarian measures upon us.
(And don't even think for one second that "the establishment" I'm referring to is the Republicans or "Neocons". The establishment permeates every single layer of our federal government now: the Presidency, Congress (House and Senate) and the various bureaucratic and law agencies which compose the federal government.)
Think of it this way: if someone were to assassinate Obama, wouldn't it make more sense - for the simple purposes of ease of execution and the matter of self preservation - to have assassinated him, oh, maybe before the Democrat primaries took off and he was just a fringe candidate?
Microsoft is a greedy cult founded by a second rate science major dropout. It is bad software.
If Vista isn't perceptibly slower for you (running on "expected by Microsoft" hardware" than XP is on substantially slower hardware (say, 1.5GHz/1Gb) then you're really not trying all that hard to use your computer. It takes very, very little to tax Vista to the point of "oh my god, I'm going to go get some coffee".
Also along those lines... They could make up for a lot of ill-will if they were to:
* Give this fictional new operating system, designed from the ground up, to Vista (and w2k8)users for free. * Offer the "backward compatible" VM for a nominal fee to said customers, with a big fucking "we're sorry".... and if they gave the OS away for near-free (ie, free for non-commercial use, maybe), they'd be able to hold onto their quickly-deteriorating market share - provided the OS isn't a complete steaming pile.
After all, which would you rather go to: Linux, and deal with rewritting your apps or "porting" them to WINE; OS X, and completely replacing your apps through a rewrite; or Microsoft Mysticism for near-free/cheap, and the compatibility pack - which would solve all your problems, short term, and likely quite a few long-term as well?
Yep: I'd say it should be reasonably simple; they'd only have to "port" one application to the new OS - an emulator which jails legacy Windows applications very firmly, yet still allowing them to run "visual native". It's not all that far from what VMWare Fusion does on Mac, or any other "desktop emulation program", really.
What they'd obviously have to do, is make it so that Windows XP itself (or any other OS) would not actually have to be installed within the emulation. Just provide all the latest libraries within the VM and do direct translation to native system calls - like WINE does, but (again) within a jail - allowing for the circumventing of (resource expensive) things like system processes, et al that are present in Windows slowing the whole affair down.
Doing that, they could get near-native (or better) speeds. And plugging in another library would be (or should be) as easy as selecting an installer for a specific application.
Realistically, this would only have to work for a handful of applications, for a handful of users, for a short period of time. Provided the next-gen OS was written with MS languages, I'd imagine a minimal re-write and recompile might be all that's needed for a lot of the newer applications, anyway: anything still getting new versions made would have a new, native version within a period of months of release.
Hell, that might even be what MS has been subtly moving towards all these years with.NET (along with their Singularity OS, or something like it).
Windows + Office are the only thing which has kept MS afloat for the past decade. Almost everything else (as far as I know, it really is everything) they've tried has failed - ie, it's been a net financial loss. I think they eventually broke even on the Xbox, and they're close to breaking even on the Xbox2, but c'mon. They've been around since the 1970s.
And Firefox wasn't made good by the end users. It was made good by the developers.
Vista is a sample size of one. Can you think of any counter-examples? OS X, per chance (the fact that it's "based" on Mach and BSD does not qualify, as the overall user-experience is proprietary)? IIS isn't all that small or simple, and it comes out as at least a workable product. AIX seems to be doing just fine. World of Warcraft (and the software/hardware behind it server-side) is easily as complex as Windows, and that seems to work.
On the other hand...
And how about large and unwieldy open source software? Surely you can think of at least one such example. Xorg and/or XFree86, per chance? I wonder how GNU/HURD is doing? How about OpenOffice.org (which is getting significantly better) but still will often crash during document recovery, and has a number of other problems with regard to corrupting documents and saving massive files (not just OOorg format, but DOC and PDF are all >100kb for a 1 page document, it seems!). Or how about KDE, which with version 4 is only slightly less bloated, sluggish, and so forth than Vista (and just as unusable as Vista on a 1.5GHz/1G system)? Or the wonderful mess that the Enlightenment project is - 10 years out from the last point release and 8 years from the last time anyone gave a damn, largely unusable and forgotten, but still in active development? And should I even mention what a stupid, stupid idea Avahi is, or the nightmare that having it an integral part of the major desktops/distros is? Or synergy, which is an awesome project with a lot of potential - but appears to have been abandoned and has some piss-poor security considerations?
And I could keep going. I love open source, but let's not candy coat a turd or shit-coat candy. The point is, the fact that it's closed source has nothing to do with it.
Vista is just Vista. Yes, they introduced some interesting concepts, but tried to stretch everything else too far, cut a lot of features, and left a lot of stuff half-done while ripping out most of those features. So it's a buggy, bloated, steaming pile of feces which won't work to an acceptable level for at least 3 years until after it was released - just like every other major MS product. That's just the way MS works; it's nothing inherent to large closed-source software projects.
Simple: right now, ATI is stomping on Nvidia in terms of price and performance. The only thing Nvidia has going for them is their PhysX. Take that away - or make it an open standard by which ATI can also play - and Nvidia loses, becoming another "has been" vendor of high-end cards.
No. But people who are under-employed would certainly skewer the statistics if they were included, and they aren't.
A case of someone who is college educated in a scientific field who can only find menial work is an example of underemployment.
Re:Get Over Yourselves People!
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
People have absolutely no incentive to make their travel decisions based on anything but price when a person is guaranteed to get the same, or nearly identical, treatment by paying more.
Could an airline charge twice, or three times as much, with the promise of better service? No, absolutely not: they'd still be fucked-up by the airline terminals and flight scheduling. There's no getting around that.
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Yes, there were partisan politics. Partisan politics are not mutually exclusive to caring about one's country. However, the current crop of politicians seem to have forgotten the basics of taking care of one's country, and are actively neglecting to do so in favor of, well, handing out favors and helping themselves.
The "2008 models" was an analogy to OS X only running on Macs, despite no legitimate reason why it shouldn't be possible. IE, you've got to buy a Ford to get the fancy multimedia package, and we're charging a premium on Ford vehicles today.
I was using the GP's signature as a point of parody. (s/Scientology/Microsoft/)
Counter-examples: swatches, gaudy plastic beads, Converse sneakers, small fuel-efficient cars and mopeds, and so on and so forth...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but desktop/laptop computers have yet to reach "commodity" status. That is what you are describing, for the most part. Computers are close, but not there yet: there's too much functional variety.
A commodity item is not going to have any sort of exclusive nature except in how it's sold and at what price. Short of having an identical brand on it, there's nothing to stop a company to produce something which is both functionally identical and nearly identical in appearance. THAT is commodity goods.
Cell phones are (or were, until the iPhone came to the market) commodity goods. Toasters are commodity. Furniture is commodity. Anything which has its value based on the value of the market as a whole is a commodity
If it were otherwise, your analogy would be valid. But since it isn't, it's not. See how that works?
A better analogy would be tools, such as the type one keeps in his garage.
Arguably, the only competition Apple has is itself - ie, its older models.
It'd be a stretch to say that Linux is competition with Apple, but saying MS is competition to Apple is a stretch.
You also realize that, back then, the hardware actually cost those premiums, right?
Things were different in the 1980s, too. Back in the 1980s, people bought hardware and put software on. Today, people buy software to put on their hardware. There is a big difference between those, even though it may seem subtle.
People don't care if they've got a P4, an Athlon, Hyperthreading, dual core, or any of that stuff. What they care about is their preferred software running quickly and stable.
What would happen to, say, Ford, if they started selling packaged "automotive entertainment systems", but required that they only be installed in a Ford? And, in doing so, they put a proprietary coupler/circuitry/whatever in all Fords so that it would work with a Ford.
And then they didn't advertise the fact of this coupler, but instead advertised "Works with 2008 models!" - like what Apple has been doing with Intel (as people associate "Intel" with "Wintel" - and all the respective vendors).
And even that's not a terribly good analogy, as Apple's hardware tends to be the exact same thing (or close enough to not make much of a difference) as their competition.
BTW, this is Apple's heyday. Not in the 1980s.
5% computing market share, but what about phone or portable media player? They do similar things with their batteries.
The Goracle, retired? Nay! Have you yet to hear of glow bull worming?
So a 4-star general should just drop his role as a top advisor to the President of the United States because he disagrees with the course of action?
Again, a 4-star general?
And being there to try and fix things was a better option, anyway. What would you have preferred: for him to throw in the towel in a huff for personal political gain?
That's not the kind of person I want anywhere the seat of power. Powell did the Right Thing.
Wait, why would the color of either man's skin make any difference?
Is that an admittance that this really is just about race for a lot of Obama's supporters? :(
I don't recall who said it, but a quote similar to this, by one of our founding fathers, is appropriate:
The republic will last as long as the people refuse to vote themselves the treasury.
(I believe that was Ben Franklin.)
It was well understood by the founding fathers that this country would not survive as a republican democracy, with a limited federal government, without a well-educated, well-informed populace who were willing to vote for the greater good (as seen through the lens of self-reliance and self-determination).
The Great Depression broke that spine - not only the economic depression itself, but the asinine and abusive policies Roosevelt put in place to ensure "employment" - while at the same time squashing free will and the ability to innovate. He kept the depression running at least 5 years longer than it would have otherwise (in fact, the economy was already recovering by the time his policies started affecting things - resulting in another downturn).
Now, we're in a situation where both parties play politics in the purest sense, and whichever one promises the best "deal" to the most people, wins - neither party gives a damn about principle and ensuring peoples' liberties to do as they please, and our taxes are many times higher now than they were when the tea went into Boston Harbor.
What does being smart have to do with anything?
A smart or educated person can leave the country once they've fucked it up to no or relative loss. A property owner is, essentially, fucked if the country goes to shit. A property owner has to live with his decisions and take the losses.
A PhD living, say, in a rental, has no such responsibility to vote in a conscionable manner to ensure the property of his compatriots remains safe. "Who cares if property taxes go up? I'm goddamn renting and it's for the public good!"
And what is it that non-property owners bring to the table, in terms of capital to drive the nation? More importantly, what have they to lose - not land or property, just themselves. A person, unlike property, can withstand the throes of economic hardship or war simply by leaving.
If they're not helping row the boat, why should they get a say in which direction it goes?
It's like the children getting to decide on which side of the road to drive while on the way to vacation. "Let's go this way!" "No, let's go this way now!" End result: you never make any progress and the people who actually have to do the work get very, very mad. Ergo, totalitarianism, ie "Goddamn kids, shut up and let me drive!"
Undersigned,
Caimlas, the non-property or asset owner who realizes that most people in his condition are even less fit than he is to decide on the fate of others, as they're unable to make even their own lives functional.
Excuse me? Better civil servant than politician?
What, exactly, do you think the role of a politician is? In this republic - the United States of America - it is intended to be that of a civil servant. That may not be the case in practice, but it is the philosophy to which we should strive.
And no, this does not mean I think Powell would make a good VP, for either party. Though he'd make a better one for Obama than for McCain.
It used to be that the VP would be the loser from the actual Presidential race, not the party primary. But that was before partisan politics ran the country, and the politicians actually - at least - pretended to care about the fate of America. You know, back when there was at least some rough idea that both sides would put aside their petty differences and try to work together for the betterment of the country.
You're kidding, right?
A younger President who fucks over the country won't have to go down with the country. He'll just go chum overseas with some bureaucrat or royal heir after cashing out his/her billions into a foreign currency. It happens in other countries, and it will happen here, too: the rich, famous, powerful and influential people in this world are never held accountable for their actions.
Cases in point: Michael Jackson or Nelson Mandela. Or for that matter, GWB.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this "white America is overtly racist".
I am a white man. At least, that's what I have to check when filling out those goddamn affirmative action questionnaires on employment applications. But I, nor any white man I know, is racist. The only racists I have ever met have been black, Mexican (ie, 1st or 2nd generation American inhabitants), and Asian (Chinese and Japanese). I once heard of a crazy motherfucker named Dewey, who was always talking about killing niggers, but he's the exception to the rule, and was chastised and shunned as a result.
I see a lot of hatred for the so-called "black culture" which is manifest in rap music. But no self-respecting black man (or man of any color) would call the things talked about in that music "his". It's more likely, in my experience, for only the criminally minded types (many of which are white) to adhere to things like that.
White Americans are, by and large, afraid of even being thought of as racist. Many are so incredible fearful of such a labeling - because it is quite often a label which will result in job termination, social chastisement, lawsuit, and any number of other things - that they'll go out of their way to side with the race card holders and claim themselves that whites are racist. The only claim I can imagine them having is against the institutional nature of racism, and even that can be easily dismissed by things like affirmative action, various social programs and, well, the fact that there's a black presidential candidate.
If whites are so overtly racist, then why are groups like the KKK almost universally reviled amongst whites (yes, even out in the sticks), but groups run by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan are praised and heralded by the media while they preach that all of society's ills are the whitey's fault? That doesn't sound like racism against blacks to me.
Yes, there are fringe groups. There are always fringe groups - in every culture, hating every other culture. But let's have some fucking intellectual integrity, people: any racism against blacks, above that of any other cultural group, is manifest almost exclusively by the media.
If Obama doesn't "survive to inauguration" as you suggest, it isn't because whitey hates blacks - though that'll surely be the accusation across the country. If it happens (and I highly doubt it will), it would most likely be for some other policy or holds, or simply to leverage his death has a martyrdom by the establishment to enforce more totalitarian measures upon us.
(And don't even think for one second that "the establishment" I'm referring to is the Republicans or "Neocons". The establishment permeates every single layer of our federal government now: the Presidency, Congress (House and Senate) and the various bureaucratic and law agencies which compose the federal government.)
Think of it this way: if someone were to assassinate Obama, wouldn't it make more sense - for the simple purposes of ease of execution and the matter of self preservation - to have assassinated him, oh, maybe before the Democrat primaries took off and he was just a fringe candidate?
Microsoft is a greedy cult founded by a second rate science major dropout. It is bad software.
If Vista isn't perceptibly slower for you (running on "expected by Microsoft" hardware" than XP is on substantially slower hardware (say, 1.5GHz/1Gb) then you're really not trying all that hard to use your computer. It takes very, very little to tax Vista to the point of "oh my god, I'm going to go get some coffee".
Also along those lines... They could make up for a lot of ill-will if they were to:
* Give this fictional new operating system, designed from the ground up, to Vista (and w2k8)users for free. ... and if they gave the OS away for near-free (ie, free for non-commercial use, maybe), they'd be able to hold onto their quickly-deteriorating market share - provided the OS isn't a complete steaming pile.
* Offer the "backward compatible" VM for a nominal fee to said customers, with a big fucking "we're sorry".
After all, which would you rather go to: Linux, and deal with rewritting your apps or "porting" them to WINE; OS X, and completely replacing your apps through a rewrite; or Microsoft Mysticism for near-free/cheap, and the compatibility pack - which would solve all your problems, short term, and likely quite a few long-term as well?
Yep: I'd say it should be reasonably simple; they'd only have to "port" one application to the new OS - an emulator which jails legacy Windows applications very firmly, yet still allowing them to run "visual native". It's not all that far from what VMWare Fusion does on Mac, or any other "desktop emulation program", really.
What they'd obviously have to do, is make it so that Windows XP itself (or any other OS) would not actually have to be installed within the emulation. Just provide all the latest libraries within the VM and do direct translation to native system calls - like WINE does, but (again) within a jail - allowing for the circumventing of (resource expensive) things like system processes, et al that are present in Windows slowing the whole affair down.
Doing that, they could get near-native (or better) speeds. And plugging in another library would be (or should be) as easy as selecting an installer for a specific application.
Realistically, this would only have to work for a handful of applications, for a handful of users, for a short period of time. Provided the next-gen OS was written with MS languages, I'd imagine a minimal re-write and recompile might be all that's needed for a lot of the newer applications, anyway: anything still getting new versions made would have a new, native version within a period of months of release.
Hell, that might even be what MS has been subtly moving towards all these years with .NET (along with their Singularity OS, or something like it).
What are you, like, 12?
Windows + Office are the only thing which has kept MS afloat for the past decade. Almost everything else (as far as I know, it really is everything) they've tried has failed - ie, it's been a net financial loss. I think they eventually broke even on the Xbox, and they're close to breaking even on the Xbox2, but c'mon. They've been around since the 1970s.
And Firefox wasn't made good by the end users. It was made good by the developers.
Vista is a sample size of one. Can you think of any counter-examples? OS X, per chance (the fact that it's "based" on Mach and BSD does not qualify, as the overall user-experience is proprietary)? IIS isn't all that small or simple, and it comes out as at least a workable product. AIX seems to be doing just fine. World of Warcraft (and the software/hardware behind it server-side) is easily as complex as Windows, and that seems to work.
On the other hand...
And how about large and unwieldy open source software? Surely you can think of at least one such example. Xorg and/or XFree86, per chance? I wonder how GNU/HURD is doing? How about OpenOffice.org (which is getting significantly better) but still will often crash during document recovery, and has a number of other problems with regard to corrupting documents and saving massive files (not just OOorg format, but DOC and PDF are all >100kb for a 1 page document, it seems!). Or how about KDE, which with version 4 is only slightly less bloated, sluggish, and so forth than Vista (and just as unusable as Vista on a 1.5GHz/1G system)? Or the wonderful mess that the Enlightenment project is - 10 years out from the last point release and 8 years from the last time anyone gave a damn, largely unusable and forgotten, but still in active development? And should I even mention what a stupid, stupid idea Avahi is, or the nightmare that having it an integral part of the major desktops/distros is? Or synergy, which is an awesome project with a lot of potential - but appears to have been abandoned and has some piss-poor security considerations?
And I could keep going. I love open source, but let's not candy coat a turd or shit-coat candy. The point is, the fact that it's closed source has nothing to do with it.
Vista is just Vista. Yes, they introduced some interesting concepts, but tried to stretch everything else too far, cut a lot of features, and left a lot of stuff half-done while ripping out most of those features. So it's a buggy, bloated, steaming pile of feces which won't work to an acceptable level for at least 3 years until after it was released - just like every other major MS product. That's just the way MS works; it's nothing inherent to large closed-source software projects.
Simple: right now, ATI is stomping on Nvidia in terms of price and performance. The only thing Nvidia has going for them is their PhysX. Take that away - or make it an open standard by which ATI can also play - and Nvidia loses, becoming another "has been" vendor of high-end cards.
No. But people who are under-employed would certainly skewer the statistics if they were included, and they aren't.
A case of someone who is college educated in a scientific field who can only find menial work is an example of underemployment.
People have absolutely no incentive to make their travel decisions based on anything but price when a person is guaranteed to get the same, or nearly identical, treatment by paying more.
Could an airline charge twice, or three times as much, with the promise of better service? No, absolutely not: they'd still be fucked-up by the airline terminals and flight scheduling. There's no getting around that.